Newsmaking and Sensemaking: Facebook Discourse on COVID-19 in Italy in the First Three Months of the Pandemic

The uncertainty that characterized the initial phase of COVID-19 involved various actors in attempting to define a common sense regarding the crisis. The newspapers’ pages on social media, especially Facebook, constituted the central spaces where the top-down institutional interpretive framing efforts and the bottom-up representations circulated by users in the comments interplayed. Recognizing the relevance of these aspects, this research examines the interaction between top-down news-making and bottom-up sense-making in the first three months of the pandemic on the Facebook page of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. The results show that the predominant topics in the institutional thematic agenda do not coincide with those articulated by the audience. In addition, the users’ attitude towards solipsism must be underlined, as the majority posts isolated comments, without engaging in a proper dialogue. This evidence highlights the misalignment between newsmaking and sensemaking during the first months of the epidemic, which problematizes the newspapers’ ability to effectively set the agenda for online discussions during crises.