The promise of the Internet to foster democratic bottom-up participation of civil society in political decision-making processes has been widely questioned at least since the Arab Spring counterrevolutions. It has become even more scrutinized after the digital platforms were widely appropriated by populist discourses and by digital disinformation strategies, including in democracies. The increasingly platformized media infrastructures have been used not only for deliberative democratic practices of bottom-up or horizontal communication, but also for non-democratic purposes of political disinformation and strategic polarisation, exemplified by Covid-19 denialism or the disinformation campaign during the 2016 US election. This Summer School will explore both the consequences of digital platforms’ omnipresence in non-democracies, with a special focus on Belarus, as well as the anti-democratic aspects of digital developments in democracies, such as digital disinformation. This conceptual and empirical multi-sited focus on the transformation of the political realm due to platformization will provide a comparative framework for the dialogue among academic scholars, sectoral experts, civic activists, and students of all levels.