From intellectual to influencer. Populist mediation in the citizenship referendum debate.

The emergence of the internet has often been associated with an egalitarian communicative ideal: the shift from a one-to-many to a many-to-many model, the supposed end of the audience, and the rise of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006) were interpreted as evidence of the disappearance of gatekeepers. Rather than producing a flat and inclusive communicative space, however, digital environments have fostered new forms of concentration of power, visibility, and influence. This study explores the crisis of traditional cultural mediators - the emergence of a society "without intellectuals" (Caravale, 2023) - within the broader framework of a profound transformation in the Habermasian public sphere (Habermas, 2023; Schlesinger, 2024) and a parallel crisis of politics (Kirchheimer, 2015; Gerbaudo, 2019) marked by the rise of populism and anti-elitist rhetoric (Merkley, 2020). The research argues that the promise of disintermediation has resulted in a "re-intermediation" based on algorithmic visibility and the attention economy (Terranova, 2012), where visibility capital increasingly replaces symbolic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1996). This theoretical framework is empirically explored through a case study of the online debate surrounding the Italian citizenship referendum held on 8–9 June 2025. The analysis is based on a dataset of 2,246 posts collected over a ten-week period on X and Bluesky. Using engagement-based rankings, the Gini concentration index, and sentiment analysis (NRC Emotion Lexicon), the study addresses whether digital debate promotes re-intermediation, identifies the central actors, and examines how emotional dynamics drive centrality across different platforms. Findings show a high concentration of engagement, suggesting that the digital public sphere remains far from egalitarian. On X, the debate is dominated by hyper-visible political actors employing populist and emotionally charged strategies - most notably the "Hyperleader" Roberto Vannacci. Emotional analysis reveals high levels of negative affect (anger and fear), indicating a polarized environment. In contrast, Bluesky displays lower emotional intensity and a more heterogeneous composition of engaged users. Rather than enabling new critical voices, the debate was dominated by figures able to ride the wave of digital consensus through self-branding and populist strategies. This suggests that the myth of disintermediation conceals an opposite process: the concentration of attention around a few powerful actors who act as new cultural mediators. Furthermore, this algorithmically-driven populist form of intermediation has profound consequences for the future of democratic deliberation.