‘Welcome to favelas, but in Italy’: Urban precariousness, right-wing ideology and phatic nihilism on social media

Abstract

Numerous social media projects have depicted grim scenes of urban life in big cities. By exploiting crime or garbage collection problems, for example, these pages have created pessimistic ways of perceiving the city and engaging citizens in search of memes or viral videos. This research invested in two multiplatform projects based in Italy, Welcome to Favelas and Simone Cicalone, to verify their inclination to specific ideologies or political intent behind interventions on social media. Using visual metadata and LDA-generated topics, this paper anchors a visual and critical discourse analysis interested in mapping creators’ phatic strategies. Exploratory results suggest a few formulaic, though elliptic, ways of manipulating audiences for crypto-ideological purposes mainly leaning to the right, theorised here as phatic nihilism.