Banalization as Mediation: Youtuber Franchino and His Hateful Vernacularity

This chapter examines how social media can “banalize” aggressive, populist-inflected speech rather than simply amplify extreme hate. Focusing on the Italian YouTube food influencer Franchino er Criminale (Alessandro Bologna), we analyze the evolution of his vernacular style and the platform dynamics that shape it. Drawing on Billig’s notion of banal nationalism, we propose the concept of “banal hate speech” to capture low-intensity, everyday aggressive discourse that functions less through explicit dehumanization of minorities and more through the construction of antagonistic “us vs. them” relations. Through a molecular, processual reading of Franchino’s videos, we show how his attacks on “food-porn” influencers, negligent restaurant owners, and “mindless followers” articulate broader currents of gastro-nationalism and gastro-populism. As Franchino’s audience expands from the Roman borgata to a national public, his dialect, persona, and targets are strategically modulated, translating local working-class authenticity into an imagined Italian “people.” We argue that YouTube’s political economy and procedural rhetoric incentivize this shift: virality rewards emotional intensity, personalization, and serial content, encouraging a tamed but pervasive aggressiveness that mediates populist and nationalist sensibilities. Ultimately, the case complicates deterministic accounts of online radicalization by foregrounding how platformed vernacularity can normalize symbolic violence while simultaneously reconfiguring cultural critique into commodified micro-ideologies.