There is one thing to say right away, and that is that there is rarely a logical and rational explanation of what happens on social networks, of why something goes viral or ends up being seen by more or less everyone. There are some hypotheses, but there are usually few certainties.
Confirming the rule is what is happening these days on TikTok, where Nicole Minetti appears in hundreds of widely viewed and shared videos over 10 years after the end of her political career. Why has a forty-year-old who is no longer famous become famous again on a platform aimed mainly at twenty-year-olds? We don’t know, exactly.
From TikTok to Twitter, via searches on Google
We don’t know, but we can try to understand it. Before doing so, it is appropriate to confirm that the trend is indeed a trend: a quick search on TikTok allows us to understand that the former regional councilor of the PDL (former showgirl, former deejay, former dental hygienist of Silvio Berlusconi) is in fact very present on TikTok, with people pointing out “I’ve only had her in Per Te for a week”.
It is such a trend that it left TikTok and also arrived on Twitter, which at least has not (yet?) lost its role as a certifier of trends: even on Musk’s platform there are many people talking about Nicole Minetti, who share photos or audio clips of him and even admit that “I didn’t know who he was until 5 minutes ago”. From this curiosity another consequence was born: precisely because “I didn’t know who she was until 5 minutes ago”, people are evidently searching for Nicole Minetti on Google, with a surge in queries starting from March 28th and connections with Gigi D ‘Alessio, Gué Pequeno, Renzo Bossi, Berlusconi and obviously the Ruby case.
Nicole Minetti viral on TikTok, two clues and little evidence
These names (some more than others) are all clues that in some way can help answer the initial question: what is Nicole Minetti doing on a social network populated by people who don’t even know who she is? The first sensation is that she is there regardless of who she is: aided by her physical appearance, and by a series of phrases, expressions and attitudes undoubtedly capable of capturing attention, she is used by girls and boys to construct memes and catchphrases (usually linked to school, university, the annoyance of daily tasks) which have little to do with the character himself.
Confirmation of this comes from the numbers: if you search for Nicole Minetti on TikTok you see that there are objectively many videos, but that the hashtag #nicoleminetti is almost never used (less than 400 times, so far). She is there, but she is not identified as her: she is just a person whose image, voice and facial expressions are used. And it doesn’t matter whether whoever posts the video knows who she is or not.
Another hypothesis that has some foundation concerns his connection with Berlusconi (“great talent scout”, someone wrote on TikTok), whose figure is still very present on social media, and above all with the rapper Gué Pequeno, with whom Minetti had a romantic relationship in 2013. Given his surge in popularity, in turn linked to the song Come un Tuono by Rose Villain, which was even talked about on Italian prime time news, it is not unlikely that we went from one thing to another and then another and another. From Rose Villain to Gué Pequeno and then from Gué Pequeno to Nicole Minetti, in short. Magic of the TikTok algorithm, and the mystery of social media.