Limits for the Political Communication Through Large Online Platforms: from "The caste" to "The plot"

Abstract

The internet creates a complex interplay between communicative practices, political influence, diffusion of ideas, and technological infrastructure. The growing dominance of large online platforms (Facebook, Google, Twitter…) and the development of opaque algorithms, not under public evaluation, are reordering the power relations between political and social actors that shapes and defines the public agenda. We present the results of two longitudinal empirical studies from two communication campaigns (n= 688,982 and n= 48,864 unique publications) of the Spanish political party Podemos. The results show the impact of two different guiding metaphors and the intermediary effects of large social platforms in shaping the public agenda.