Lombardy regionals, Majorino and the battle of fake news. The Pd candidate denounces Fontana’s staff: “Defamatory posts”

A week after the vote for the regional elections in Lombardy, a controversy on social media shakes the electoral campaign. Subject of the dispute, some alleged “fake news” which, according to the news site Fanpage.it, the communication agency that manages the profiles of the outgoing governor Attilio Fontana would have disseminated – for a fee – to discredit one of the opponents, the candidate of the center-left and the 5 Star Movement Pierfrancesco Majorino.

The Pd MEP immediately triggered the complaint: “Following the news learned from some press organs, I have given a mandate to my lawyers to proceed with a complaint to the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office and a complaint to Agcom”. This is the motivation: “I learned that the right has fueled, by paying, the proliferation of fake news about me in recent days. I consider it a very serious thing, it is clear that in the face of an operation financed to discredit me and ensure that hoaxes circulate this is really a problem of a democratic nature. I’m waiting for an apology from Fontana since I learned that “financing” the offending posts “is someone close to him”. Finally: “I must say that all this is the confirmation of the fact that Fontana and his associates are afraid and I am convinced that we are playing it even more”. According to the article published on Fanpage, some “defamatory” posts against Majorino were shared on Facebook pages which “are attributable to the communication that takes care of the electoral campaign for Attilio Fontana”.

The agency under accusation is SocialCom, led by Luca Ferlaino. Who entrusts his long reply to a note: “We wish to deny that SocialCom has a strategy to discredit the candidate Pierfrancesco Majorino. The Facebook page mentioned by the Fanpage journalist in the past has been used by us mainly to amplify the contents of the newspaper Blitzquotidiano, with whom we had a collaborative relationship that ended in 2021. The management of the Facebook page was shared with other realities and professionals who deal with digital communication and editorial dissemination.As those who deal with digital know, it is not possible to be owners of a Facebook page, therefore the publication and sponsorship activity can be carried out by multiple Facebook profiles.The only two contents reported in the Fanpage article are news reports, which to us do not appear to be the subject of denials or lawsuits for defamation and which have been repeatedly published on social media channels and websites the last period. We don’t understand how we can talk about a defamatory “strategy”. We cannot trace with certainty the identity of the person, among the many administrator profiles of the page, who published/sponsored the two news stories indicated in the Fanpage piece. In any case, to avoid fueling tensions, in this final phase of the electoral campaign where misunderstandings and exploitation are always possible, we have obscured the Facebook page, so as to resolve the issue at its root”.