Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic, and the consequent health and economic crisis, have highlighted and accelerated longer-lasting trends. Among these, the transformations of public opinion and online political participation are of particular importance. Through the analysis of the role of social networks, and in particular of Facebook, in the communication flows among institutions, the media system and citizens, the essay identifies and problematises the existing tensions between, on the one hand, the possibilities offered by digital technologies in reinvigorating the institutions of democratic politics and, on the other hand, the top-down, authoritarian and manipulative drifts of the information society. The aim of the paper is to understand the relationships between politics, communication and technology using the current crisis as a test bed for theories and analytical perspectives developed in recent decades