Social Media and Sicily’s Anti-Mafia Movement

George de Stefano

MAFIAs

April 25-26

John D. Calandra Italian American Institute

Civil society anti-Mafia organizations

• Addiopizzo

• Addiopizzo Catania

• Libera

• Antimafia Duemila

Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino

Addiopizzo’s challenge to Palermo (An entire people that pays the pizzo is a people without

dignity)

Addiopizzo Catania: founded in 2006

“Together We Can Lower the Volume on the Mafia”

Addiopizzo volunteer recruitment campaign, featuring Roy Paci

Libera (“associations, names, and numbers against the Mafias)

Cooperativa Sociale Placido Rizzotto

The Placido Rizzotto

Cooperative inn, on property

seized from the Mafia and

supported by Libera

Antimafia Duemila

Mafia groups “act and proliferate

in close connection with institutional

power, political and economic.”

— Giorgio Bongiovanni,

Antimafia Duemila

“It is impossible not to talk about the

state when you talk about Mafia.”

— Giovanni Falcone

Facebook page for “all those who respect ToTo [sic] Riina”

Piazza San Domenico, Palermo

After vandals destroyed the piazza’s

popular pedestrian islands,

city residents organized via

Facebook to repair the damage

and defy the Mafia

A New Culture, A Better Future?

Young Sicilians celebrate the arrest of a prominent Mafioso