Igor Sacramento 248 doubtedly, online social media were strategic in engaging public opinion in this moral crusade, especially, because “they favor the understanding of politics as something personal, in the order of individual choices and, ultimately, moral.” Another aspect of this new public sphere refers to digital platforms that have become increasingly relevant to the dynamics of public opinion development. The “platformization” process of contemporary societies led to a transformation of the public debate spaces (JIN, 2020; VAN DIJCK; POELL; DE WAAL, 2018). The centrality of platforms, which have become places of confrontation and conflict over public opinion issues, facilitated the emergence of information disorder phenomena bringing traditional concepts of media studies, like “manipulation” and “influence,” back into the public and academic debate. The elements that made the topic of manipulation resurface in recent studies on politics are precisely associated with digital communication, which initially seemed to be the place for the subject autonomy and would become a space of user manipula- tion through algorithms. The analysis of the role of digital and network communication in contemporary social and political configurations must also seek to understand the changes in the regime of the truth. Recently, Jayson Harsin (2020) argued that post-truth phenomena - fake news, rumors, lies, conspiracies, disinforma- tion, science denial, political polarization, moral panic - could usefully be viewed through a lens of aggressive emotion and masculinity understood as the politics of emotive truth (emo- truth). If, as scholars of critical communication have theorized, post-truth refers to a historical change in what Michel Foucault called the “regime of truth,” the breaking and reassembly of a particular institutional apparatus for the production and maintenance of truths, the emotional truth refers to a response to the crisis. Emotional truth thrives in an era also characterized by, if not post-trust, at least widespread distrust. Simmel (1967) pioneered the argument that trust was closely related to popular knowledge or public truth in the modern mass, particularly in urban societies. It was an intermediate form of truth between scientific or religious truths/beliefs and popular opinion. Public knowledge is, in a word, outsourced. Giddens (1994) later saw
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