Pop Fascism: Inside the New Aesthetics of the Online Far Right

20 November 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and April marked the 80th anniversary of the execution of Italian leader Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, after a group of partisans detained them as they fled to Switzerland.

Meanwhile, on TikTok, the Falange’s anthem, Cara al Sol (Face to the Sun), accompanies hundreds of videos in different styles: from the classic version to reggaeton,  instrumental tracks, or a version sung with a voice that seems to have been generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The platform X is full of memes and content that purports to be humorous. After Argentine footballer Franco Mastantuono signed with Real Madrid, messages such as “Go Franco! Next up is Hitl… I mean, Stiller!” flourished on the social network, accompanied by a photo of both dictators. In Italy, Romano Benito Floriani Mussolini, an Italian football player and great-grandson of dictator Benito Mussolini, is celebrated with slogans such as “Vincere e vinceremo” (We shall win and we shall conquer), the fascist battle cry that Mussolini uttered in his speech announcing Italy’s entry into World War II.

Discourse aligned with fascist and Nazi ideology is spreading on social media, adapting its style and form to new platforms. This type of content is supported by digital language like brightly colored memes, songs, images and videos made with artificial intelligence.  Memes and other content become a crucial weapon in disinformation and manipulation campaigns due to their ability to go viral easily, making it easier to propagate and consolidate these narratives among younger people and continue to spread many years after the end of fascist regimes.

The soundtrack of fascist propaganda

On October 5, 2024, a mega-concert was organized in the surroundings of Toledo (Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) with the participation of several international RAC (Rock Against Communism) music groups, a movement linked to neo-Nazi ideology, born in the United Kingdom at the end of 1970s.

In September 2024, the neo-Nazis organisation Veneto Fronte Skinheads organized a nazi-rock event in Verona (Italy) in memory of Ian Stuart Donaldson, founder of the English neo-Nazi network Blood and Honour. Among the band invited, there was the Verona-based band Gesta Bellica, who has a repertoire of songs dedicated, for example, to Erich Priebke, the SS officer responsible for the Fosse Ardeatine massacre, and to the defense of Hitler’s bunker in the Battle of Berlin: “A thousand comrades, who came from all over Europe / Are here with me, sacrificing their lives,” the lyrics say.

Even CasaPound, Italy’s best-known far-right political movement with neo-fascist roots, has its reference band. The movement’s founder, Gianluca Iannone, formed the band ZetaZeroAlfa in the late 1990s; their lyrics address typical neo-fascist themes connected to the exaltation of the history of the Ventennio. As La Stampa wrote at the time, concerts have for years been the main tool of these neo-Nazi groups for radicalizing very young people, and they also become occasions for strengthening international ties.

RAC music is present on the main online streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music…), but also on social media: bands such as the Spanish Pugilato use “these digital media to spread their message” based on “radical ideologies close to hate speech”, according to the mentioned study by Complutense University of Madrid. Maldita.es found hundreds of pieces of content in Spanish that use audio from a 2001 song called División Azul  by Toletum, another Spanish group in the RAC movement.

For example, on TikTok, there is one audio clip with the Toletum song that has been used in more than 1,700 videos still available on the platform. On Spotify, the group Toletum gets more than 26,000 monthly plays.

It doesn’t end with RAC music. There is also space for a less current but no less mainstream musical trend. Contents that use songs directly linked to the Francoist movement in Spain stand out. One example is the different versions circulating on social media of Cara al sol, the hymn of the Spanish Falange composed on December 3, 1935, and made the “national hymn” of Francisco Franco’s regime in 1937. Both more traditional versions of the song (such as this TikTok audio by the Auxiliary Military Academy Band, which has already been used in more than 4,600 videos) and other interpretations with more contemporary musical styles and manipulated videos of current artists supposedly singing this song, including the Spanish singer Aitana, the Canarian artist Quevedo, and DJ David Guetta, have gone viral. There was even a manipulated video of French-Spanish footballer Le Normand “playing” Cara al Sol on the piano.

Famous pop songs like Adele’s “Someone Like You”, or the famous Italian children’s songs known as “La zia di Forlì,” or tracks trending on social media like Bazzi’s “Mine”, accompany photos and videos of Mussolini – for example, while he gives speeches in Piazza Venezia, in Rome – to showcase «the greatness and beauty of the Duce». Coupled with lyrics like “Never mind, I’ll find someone like you” or “You so fuckin’ precious when you smile,” these contents end up propagating an altered, harmless, even desirable image of the Duce.

On TikTok and YouTube it can be found AI-generated videos of a Mussolini avatar dancing merrily on a stage, in school hallways, and on a basketball court, often to catchy original songs praising the Duce. The lyrics of one such song, for example, go: “’M’ like Mussolini / everybody likes me / moms and children.” The song, written by an Internet user, has likewise been used by other profiles to accompany images, memes, or fascist propaganda videos, or clips in which “gym bros”, boys obsessed with working out, show themselves doing physical activities; after all, masculinity and virility are emblems of fascism.

The “Trump dance” has also entered the repertoire of “pop fascism” in Italy. Videos have been uploaded to YouTube of Donald Trump dancing to “Der Mussolini,” a song by the German electronic group D.A.F. that goes: “Get up / clap your hands / shake your hips / dance the Mussolini / dance the Adolf Hitler / move your ass / dance the Jesus Christ / dance the communism”. Because of the lyrics, the group has sometimes been mistaken for neo-Nazis, but reading interviews with the members makes it clear that the song’s intent was to poke fun at dictators with surreal twists of phrases, concepts, and sounds.

Primo de Rivera’s speeches: a trend on TikTok

Contents related to fascist ideology on different platforms go further than music. In Spain speeches clips from José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish Falange, and Blas Piñar, a politician and lawyer who served as president of the far-right Fuerza Nueva party during the transition from dictatorship to democracy, can be found easily. Public speeches by both figuresare used in audio format (and, to a minor extent, video) to glorify them or defend their political ideals.

One example is a TikTok audio clip used in almost 400 videos that uses one of the fundamental slogans of Francoism: “España, una, grande y libre” (“Spain, one, great, and free” in English), the founding slogan of Francoist ideology that summarized the myth of eternal and indivisible Spain in three words that were easy to memorize and repeat, as indicated in this article from the University of Alicante.

Content that uses these resources contains symbols related to Franco’s regime, such as the Valley of the Fallen (called Cuelgamuros Valley since 2022, due to the implementation of the Democratic Memory Law), a symbol of Franco’s legacy and the place where Primo de Rivera and Francisco Franco were buried until their exhumations in April 2023 and October 2019, respectively, or the Spanish flag used during Franco’s dictatorship with the eagle of St. John the Evangelist.

How fascist propaganda took over social media

Franco as a green frog (known as Pepe the Frog, a comic book character who ended up becoming a symbol of hate, depicted as Adolf Hitler and a member of the white supremacist KKK) or with pink glasses, videos of Mussolini dancing or Hitler imitating Cristiano Ronaldo’s celebration. Images have greater visual power than any text, and those who use them are aware of the impact they can have.

“Neo-fascist groups have always sort of adapted to the prevailing technologies of the time, so it’s natural that they are now moving towards social media,” Kye Allen, PhD in International Relations, researcher at the University of Oxford, and author of numerous articles on extremism and social media, tells Maldita.es. They have evolved their strategies by adding new elements to their discourse. One example is memes: images or videos containing a block of text that can be easily shared on social media. The article Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker, published on the University of Oxford’s academic research platform, defines them as “units of popular culture disseminated, imitated, and transformed by users” who seek to share that cultural experience with other users.

With this type of content, which makes communication more visual and less radical, the groups promoting it are trying to become more mainstream. In fact, a research article published in 2019 states that the spread of far-right ideology on the internet is closely linked to memes, which are capable of achieving wide dissemination and reach. In the long term, they can lead to an acclimatization to extremist content, followed by the normalization of radical statements and the displacement of norms and conventions toward the extreme.

One of the problems with memes in this context is that they encourage the trivialisation of history. All this content, often generated with AI tools, serves to strip its protagonists “of the crimes and atrocities they committed” and becomes a weapon to “normalize extremist ideas”, explains senior professor of Carlos III University, Matilde Eiroa.

Memes have become a crucial weapon in disinformation and manipulation campaigns due to their ability to go viral easily, even among highly educated people, according to a study by the National Defense University Press. In fact, academic evidence has shown that the public is unlikely to immediately identify the origin and purpose of this far-right content. Allen asserts that memes can reach young groups and “convince them of a historical revisionist narrative”, such as, for example, that during Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship in Italy, railway services were punctual.

As Leonardo Bianchi, Italian journalist and expert on politics and conspiracy theories explains to Facta: “irony is a crucial tool in the propaganda of the current far right because it allows for plausible denial: racist, anti-Semitic, or extremist things are said (or written), but at the same time, the person denies having done so by hiding behind the screen of a joke”.

From Fascist Saturday in Italy to Franco Friday or Führer Friday: remembering fascism one day a week

In June 1935, Benito Mussolini’s regime established Fascist Saturdays (sabato fascista in Italian). This was a weekly event, imposed by royal decree, during which the regime forced the people to participate in mass activities of an educational, political, professional, cultural, and sporting nature. As explained in a study by the Università degli Studi di Messina, “it became a day dedicated to large-scale standardised educational activities” that were aligned with “the political objectives of the fascist regime”. It was “one of the many ways in which Italian fascism insinuated itself into the life” of society at the time, according to another analysis from 2018. Sabato Fascista formally ceased to exist in July 1943, when the Duce‘s regime fell. However, some users have continued to revive this fascist tradition on social media.

This is not the only day on which dictators are glorified on social media. Fridays are dedicated to commemorating Hitler and Franco. Every week, humorous or aesthetic content is published that glorifies or trivializes both figures. The term Führer Fridays is used to talk about the German leader, referring to the position Hitler assumed in 1934 after abolishing the presidency (with this rank, he was outside all legal restrictions of the German state and could thus implement those policies he considered necessary for the “survival of the German race”).

At the same time, there is also space for Franco Fridays, an expression whose origin is unknown (the first publications we have found on X date from 2021). Jack Posobiec, conservative activist who has already spread conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate (an alleged pedophile ring in the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria involving Hillary Clinton and part of her campaign team), also actively promotes Franco Fridays on X. The first mention of this term on his official account is from December 29, 2023. Since then, he has posted dozens of tweets referring to Franco Fridays, all with thousands of views. He has even shared an AI-generated song called Uncle Frank, in which he says phrases such as “Spain was in trouble long long ago, but then came a man called Uncle Frank. He was brave and he was bold“ or ”Uncle Frank gave the reds a spank”.

“Users who approach these icons see them as all-powerful figures who radically changed the societies in which they lived, transgressing the norms that existed at the time,” explains Eiroa, author of the book Franco, from hero to comic figure of contemporary culture. In the words of the expert, they are “idols that young people can grab to show their rebellion against society.” This idealization, she says, is not spontaneous: it is a combination of factors that has to do with the “spread of extremist ideologies, which benefits from digital platforms” and with the “social polarization” they perceive in the political, family, and educational environment.

There is also a tendency to deify these figures and turn them into saints. “There is a lot of sanctification of these historical figures”, explains Kye Allen. Especially, says the expert, “those who were executed” and are presented “as a kind of martyrs of third positionism and neo-fascism”. This is the case, for example, with Benito Mussolini, who was shot on April 28, 1945, alongside his beloved, Clara Petacci, and then exposed and subjected to all kinds of abuse in a square in Milan; or Primo de Rivera, shot on November 20, 1936, after being accused of conspiracy against the Second Republic and military rebellion.

Cartoons and football players glorifying fascism: how propaganda sneaks into everyday life

Football is another context in which dictators are glorified by taking advantage of transfers and current events. Within “Football Twitter” community on X, interaction dynamics take shape as a communicative microcosm in which traditional football language is reworked according to the platform logic of Elon Musk’s network: irony and hyperbole function as identity tools, while memes and inside jokes consolidate a sense of belonging to the community.

Extreme polarization often replaces reasoned debate, fueling digital tribalism similar to that of stadium terraces. In this highly codified context, macho and racist discourse thrives (a combination that inevitably leads to the glorification of fascism and racism), and to comparisons between athletes considered particularly hardline on the field and Nazi hierarchs.

The names and images of some players are used to talk explicitly about dictators. The case with the most impact in Spain, according to content analysed, is that of Franco Mastantuono, an 18-year-old Argentine football player who signed a contract with Real Madrid in the 2025 summer transfer market. Until the transfer was made official, social media speculated about the midfielder’s future, with dozens of posts referring to Francisco Franco or the Franco dictatorship, taking advantage of the coincidence of the Argentine’s name with the dictator’s surname.

Some imagined the crowd at the Santiago Bernabéu stadium (home ground of the Madrid team) chanting Franco’s name, others debated what name would appear on his shirt or whether he would wear the number 39 (the year the Spanish Civil War ended), and still others made jokes about his position on the field: right wing.

This same trend has also appeared with other players such as Angelo Stiller, a German soccer player who stars in social media content due to his alleged resemblance to Hitler. Another example is Romano Benito Floriani Mussolini, an Italian player and great-grandson of dictator Benito Mussolini. He previously played for Lazio, a club whose fans have displayed banners in the stands with slogans glorifying fascism. Although the Italian has publicly requested to keep his second surname, at Cremonese, the team he is playing for this season on loan, he goes by the name Romano. In December 2024, a video circulated on social media in which fans of his then-team celebrated a goal by giving the fascist salute. Between late August and early September 2025, coinciding with the start of the new Serie A season and the debut of Romano Floriani Mussolini, on X the memes were proliferating. The memes aimed to portray the player as the ideal continuer of the family tradition and conveyed fascist slogans and quotes like “A noi” (“to us”) and “Vincere e vinceremo” (“We shall win and we shall conquer”). Another favorite target of the “Football Twitter” community is Inter player Francesco Acerbi, often portrayed (with the help of artificial intelligence) wearing an SS uniform and in the company of Mussolini or Hitler. This content plays on a supposed physical resemblance between the footballer and the Nazi dictator, due mainly to prominent mustaches, but also to an off-field episode: in 2024 the Inter defender was accused (and later cleared by the sports judge, because match footage did not allow it to be proven) of having directed racist insults at opponent Juan Jesus during a March 2024 match against Napoli.

Was Donald Duck a fascist? This may be a question on the minds of some users after watching a video of the Walt Disney animated character giving the Roman salute in front of an image of Adolf Hitler or sleeping in a room full of swastikas (a hooked cross adopted as the symbol of the Nazi party in 1920). These images may appear to be manipulated, but they are in fact real. This is a propaganda short film called Der Fuhrer’s Face (1942) produced by the American animation company at the request of the United States Army during World War II.

The aim of this film, which won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in 1943, was to “ridicule and condemn the evils of Nazism”, according to The Walt Disney Family Museum website. However, clips from this short film are circulating on social media to glorify Hitler and fascist ideology. For example, this tweet with almost 5 million views (now deleted) in which a user says that these are “the cartoons I will show my children”.

There are other examples of cartoons that were originally used as propaganda against the Nazi or fascist movement but are now being shared in fragments on social media with messages of support for these movements. This has also happened with The Ducktators (1942), a Warner Bros production released as part of a series of propaganda shorts broadcast during World War II, featuring a duck with a mustache (which is actually a caricature of Adolf Hitler), another bald duck with an Italian accent (representing Benito Mussolini), and a duck with glasses and a squeaky voice (a parody of Hideki Tōjō, a Japanese military officer who served as prime minister during World War II). The three form a dictatorship on the farm, where they simulate military marches, give fascist salutes, and deliver speeches. Images of these moments circulate on platforms such as X, Facebook, and TikTok.

Multiple platforms and coordinated networks

These contents are distributed across multiple platforms, although they are adapted to the specific characteristics of each one. While TikTok is full of videos with background music such as Cara al Sol or speeches by Primo de Rivera accompanying images or video clips, on the X network, more content is published in the form of memes or references to Franco Fridays or football, for example.

On Telegram and X, mainly, Maldita.es has identified more than 70 groups and channels aimed at a Spanish-speaking audience, which regularly share this content. For expert Kye Allen, “when we look at a lot of this kind of discourse on TikTok, Instagram and the like”, coordination, in his experience, “it is a lot more fractured”. Often, he says, “these are discreet individuals with their own little accounts who promote content” of this type. However, he adds, “there is a certain degree of coordination. So, there’s always a sort of learning and borrowing that occurs between certain individuals and groups”. For the expert, this manifests itself in various ways: on an aesthetic level, by copying similar styles or through certain genres of content. “A popular genre nowadays is the so-called ‘savior genre’”.

On X, Facta identified in 2021 the so-called mattonisti (“bricklayers”), a heterogeneous group of several hundred Italian-language X accounts, united by heavy use of post-irony (a register that mixes serious and ironic intents, making the difference between the two indistinguishable) and by the sharing of provocative, low-quality memes (what is known as “shitposting”). A mix that appears harmless, but behind which surface causes dear to the far right such as anti-abortionism, transphobia, and more generally the exaltation of authoritarianism in all latitudes.

Behind this apparently chaotic aesthetic lies a precise organisation: the mattonisti channel coordinated via Telegram where they gather to decide which hashtags to push into trending on X, exploiting current events to amplify reactionary content and normalize fascist and Nazi symbols. Sometimes their slogans are picked up by politicians and national media, creating the illusion of a spontaneous, grassroots debate.For example, the word chosen by the bricklayers #BastaLockdown (“Stop Lockdown”) in 2021 became so popular on X that Lega MEP Angelo Ciocca used it in a tweet. The mattonisti’s trademark is the use of Wojak, a crudely drawn meme character used as a mask to represent negative emotions such as sadness and melancholy. In the mattonisti context, Wojak is often turned into Mussolini or Hitler, transforming historical figures into pop icons with powerful visual appeal.

Another meme widely used among mattonisti is Pepe the Frog, mentioned before, long appropriated by the American far right and here portrayed wearing a fascist headpiece (also here, here, and here), with Adolf Hitler’s features, in an SS uniform, or as a Japanese soldier allied with the Nazis. The mattonisti appropriation involves not only memes but also pop-culture characters like Heidi, BoJack Horseman, Mickey Mouse, or cat photos.

Their main strategy remains the attempt to elicit sympathy for Mussolini and Hitler through content that presents them as ordinary people, with passions and interests. Thus multiply photos of Hitler sleeping, images of his artwork or his love of animals, drawings of Mussolini inserted into sacred contexts. This culminates in the glorification of the Nazi leader as a political figure who supposedly foresaw the “Jewish threat.” In this vein, an antisemitic text often shared by elements of the mattonisti world reads: «They told you I was a monster so you wouldn’t know that I fought against the real monsters who today govern you and dominate the world».

The content listed so far has been shared almost exclusively on X, which, as noted, does not enforce particularly strict moderation of neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, or antisemitic content. Such a strategy would be hard to detect through moderation, since in most cases these are images without text functioning as dog whistles (in coded messages that reinforce a sense of belonging to an extremist community). On the few occasions when the mattonisti community uses text posts, it employs a form of dissimulation that consists of replacing key words with others that are hard to detect: Adolf Hitler thus becomes the “Austrian painter,” Benito Mussolini “big jaw,” and the Holocaust the “lollocaustro.”

As for other platforms, like TikTok, a 2024 study published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) identified a TikTok network of more than 200 accounts “that openly supported Nazism and used the video app to promote their ideology and propaganda”.’

Although there is not always direct coordination, Kye Allen insists that “there will be sort of loose networks where we will see different accounts all promoting broadly sort of similar content. But they will be following each other, they will be liking each other, and they will be reposting each other’s content” he says. One example, he adds, is the profile of Isabel Peralta, sentenced to one year in prison by the Provincial Court of Madrid for hate crimes, a sentence she claims to have appealed. “She is featured on the TikTok account of Heritage & Destiny, a sort of neo-fascist magazine in Britain, and she is a kind of foreign correspondent, so she appears frequently on their TikTok account,” Allen explains. Back in 2023, Jeremy Corbyn, a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party, expressed concern about a visit by Peralta to the UK for an event organised by the magazine.

One of the videos mentioned by Allen, shared by the British magazine, was recorded last September in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. Peralta appears accompanied by members of Núcleo Nacional, a group that emerged after the protests in Ferraz, investigated by the Civil Guard for possible hate crimes and which recently opened its headquarters, where a painting of Adolf Hitler can be seen. The video is titled: “Isabel Peralta and her colleagues from Núcleo Nacional demonstrated yesterday in Madrid demanding that ‘White lives matter’,” alluding to the murder of Ukrainian refugee Irina Zarutska in North Carolina (United States).

Peralta has almost 16,000 followers on TikTok and around 7,000 in her Telegram channel. On the latter platform, we see that he shares content from Núcleo Nacional and other groups and channels such as La Semilla de la Verdad, La Escoba de Dios and La Biblioteca NacionalSocialista (a channel with just 600 followers, although we have identified up to seven channels on Telegram with that name). He also shares content from international actors: RadioGenoa, the Italian channel that spreads disinformation and xenophobic content about migrants, the Nordic Resistance Movement, and La Tercera Vía, “a small far-right party based in southern Germany, founded in 2013 with a strong neo-Nazi profile,” as described by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, a German public entity that promotes awareness of democracy and political participation. Peralta’s relationship with the German party dates back years. In 2021, according to the German newspaper Der Spiegel, the Spanish woman “received training in propaganda techniques” from members of this party. In 2022, German authorities denied her entry into the country after finding material with Nazi symbols in her suitcase.

The content shared by these Telegram channels ranges from chapters of Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, in both audio and PDF format, to the denial of the number of Holocaust victims (estimated at around six million by organisations such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), which they call “el Holocuento” (“Holohoax” or “Holocough”, in English), to revisionist books distributed in PDF format that question not only the number of victims but also the existence of gas chambers. In these freely downloadable books, one can read phrases such as: “The story of the crematorium oven presented as a gas chamber is very interesting, because since no gas chambers have ever been found in those camps, it is a trick that was used very often.”