  We analyze the organization, promotion and public perception of V-day, a
political rally that took place on September 8, 2007, to protest against
corruption in the Italian Parliament. Launched by blogger Beppe Grillo, and
promoted via a word of mouth mobilization on the Italian blogosphere, V-day
brought close to one million Italians in the streets on a single day, but was
mostly ignored by mainstream media. This article is divided into two parts. In
the first part, we analyze the volume and content of online articles published
by both bloggers and mainstream news sources from June 14 (the day V-day was
announced) until September 15, 2007 (one week after it took place) . We find
that the success of V-day can be attributed to the coverage of bloggers and
small-scale local news outlets only, suggesting a strong grassroots component
in the organization of the rally. We also find a dissonant thematic
relationship between content published by blogs and mainstream media: while the
majority of blogs analyzed promote V-day, major mainstream media sources
critique the methods of information production and dissemination employed by
Grillo. Based on this finding, in the second part of the study, we explore the
role of Grillo in the organization of the rally from a network analysis
perspective. We study the interlinking structure of the V-day blogosphere
network, to determine its structure, its levels of heterogeneity, and
resilience. Our analysis contradicts the hypothesis that Grillo served as a
top-down, broadcast-like source of information. Rather, we find that
information about V-day was transferred across heterogeneous nodes in a
moderately robust and resilient core network of blogs. We speculate that the
organization of V-day represents the very first case, in Italian history, of a
political demonstration developed and promoted primarily via the use of social
media on the web.
