In one day, Berlusconi surpassed 350,000 followers on TikTok

In one day

Jokes, self-bodyshaming, goats and panzerotti are among the contents published in recent days by the party leaders who landed on TikTok, on the occasion of the electoral campaign for the political elections on 25 September. But the Forza Italia leader Silvio Berlusconi was particularly notable, who in just over 24 hours surpassed all his colleagues, reaching 350 thousand followers and more than 5 million views on a single video.

As a first impact, the presence of political leaders on TikTok can be described with the adjective cringe, entered in 2021 among the new words of the Accademia della Crusca, which indicates something capable of arousing both embarrassment and discomfort. This is demonstrated by their poor understanding of the functioning of the platform and its contents, the tones used and their continuous addressing young people with a mixture of paternalism and arrogance.

For example, Berlusconi has made his entrance on the platform with a video in which he welcomes the "boys" on his channel, while those who know TikTok know very well how the social feed suggests the contents to users. So it is not people who enter his channel, but he who enters their mobile phone thanks to the algorithm.

“On this platform you guys are present in over 5 million and sixty percent of you are under thirty years old. I suffer from a bit of envy, but I still give you many compliments ”, she says immediately after the introductions, making the second mistake. In fact, the meaning of TikTok is to tell something about yourself, your life or your ideas. In fact, already registered users know very well who they are and why they are on the platform and do not want to hear it from others. It is a bit as if a new classmate arrives in a class and begins to tell the people already present who are the teachers, the good or the bad, who are the people who study the most or the nicest ones. A mistake also made by other politicians, such as Carlo Calenda, the leader of Action.

"I can't give make-up advice because I have a stomach and I'm ugly, but I can talk to you about politics. I'm going to use this channel like this and I know it's not very common, but let's try to do something uncommon, ”Calenda says in her opening video. Aside from self-bodyshaming, Calenda assumes that on TikTok there is no talk of politics, no politics and that he will be an innovator in the field ready to give advice.

Italian politicians have not yet understood how to do it use TikTok In search of the votes of Generation Z, Salvini, Meloni and others have landed on the social of the very young. The result does not seem to convince the subscribers Berlusconi's success But how can Berlusconi's success and Calenda's few followers justify themselves, if the mistakes made are similar? The first factor certainly concerns the already consolidated fame of Berlusconi, who is still indicated as a prominent person in the Italian political and business landscape. In fact, the opening of the Forza Italia leader's TikTok channel has been relaunched by most of the national newspapers, on televisions and disseminated on the social media channels of the same media, as well as by independent channels.

The second factor it is the very functioning of TikTok, whose algorithm rewards and “pushes” the first videos that are published on a channel. While the third concerns Berlusconi himself again, as an elderly character who tries to fit into a world that is not for him. In this sense, the term cringe returns. Because this detachment from reality, this Peter Pan syndrome that leads Berlusconi to tell jokes on TikTok makes you laugh, in a cringe sense, that is, with a mixture of embarrassment and discomfort, and therefore leads people to want to see its contents.

However, this ability is not inherent in other politicians. In fact, the contents of Calenda are not even funny, those of the secretary of the League, Matteo Salvini, or the leader of the Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, are instead copies of the Instagram contents, which have no hold on TikTok. But the first prize for the worst performance, in terms of both followers and understanding of the platform, goes to the Democratic Party, which created a party channel and not the secretary or another leader, not understanding that the platform is made of characters, not from parties or organizations. This mistake cost Enrico Letta's party the lowest number of followers ever among the channels of the main political parties on TikTok, stopping at just 1,648.