This is the important bit.
By putting an online platform at the heart of its operations, Five Star was way ahead of other political parties in Italy – many of which barely had a functioning website. As the movement grew, the party seemed to entrust an increasing number of decisions to party members through online ballots and crowdsourced policies. At the same time, many Five Star members treated Grillo’s blog as an oracle of truth. As a result, Casaleggio, who created and managed the blog, could use it to exert enormous sway over the movement [...]
Although Casaleggio designed Five Star to look like a member-led movement, he set the party’s course from the beginning. Casaleggio Associates not only managed Grillo’s blog; today it also runs Five Star’s digital operations and controls the valuable data being generated on Five Star’s online platform by the party’s snowballing membership. According to two recent investigations by the Italian data protection authority, the Five Star digital platform was breaching European data protection laws by tracking Five Star members in individually identifiable ways.
Casaleggio was far ahead of other political parties in using this data to help shape Five Star’s messaging, which he fed back to supporters through Grillo’s blog, and increasingly through social media. The very tools that were supposedly giving members control over the movement were allowing Casaleggio to exert control over them. With a thoughtfully crafted blogpost, he could intervene in the movement’s internal debates, bolstering certain positions and dampening others down.
“This is a long-time project of social engineering, using the web,” said Jacopo Iacoboni, who has written two books on Five Star’s rise. The first detailed how Casaleggio had begun to experiment with manipulating online consensus back in the 1990s, as the CEO of an Italian tech company that sold business tools for managing employees. He believes the way Five Star has used data is far more radical, in some ways, than what had happened in the Trump or Brexit campaigns. “In the UK and with Trump, the campaigns were, at least formally, separated from the web company running their data – think Cambridge Analytica, Aggregate IQ,” Iacoboni said. But the Five Star case is unique, he said: “A web company which creates a party, with the owner directly possessing all the data.”
Perhaps the most dramatic example of the top-down control that Casaleggio exerted over the movement was the way he choreographed the party’s decision in 2014 to align with Ukip in the European parliament. Many observers and even members of the party had assumed that Five Star was ultimately a progressive movement, so when the possibility of allying with Ukip came up, many Five Star members were appalled. “Farage’s party disgusts me,” Giulia Sarti, one of Five Star’s MPs, told the Italian newspaper La Stampa. Many vocal Five Star members wanted to ally with the Greens instead.
On Grillo’s blog, Casaleggio responded with a deluge of posts idolising Farage and criticising the Greens. One post rather fantastically claimed that Ukip, too, was essentially a progressive movement, which rejected any form of “racism, sexism or xenophobia” – even though Ukip members with offensive views had poured out of the woodwork in that year’s European elections. Another post argued that Ukip had a “coherent and principled opposition to foreign imperialist wars” in contrast to “the leaders of the Greens and the liberals, who screamed in favour of the war in Libya”. Ukip’s campaign for a referendum on EU membership was heralded as an example of its support for direct democracy.
True to its supposed values, Five Star put to an online ballot the final decision on which European alliance to join. But the post that introduced that ballot left little doubt as to which way members were expected to vote. “It was clearly in favour of the Ukip solution,” Marco Zanni, who had been elected as a Five Star MEP that May, told me. “It’s not a real democratic referendum.” In the end, about 80% of Five Star members who voted opted to ally with Farage. Grillo’s blog hailed the decision as a new milestone in direct democracy. At Casaleggio’s request, said Filippo Pittarello, the Five Star staff member, Farage changed the name of his Ukip-led alliance from Europe of Freedom and Democracy to Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy.