media; youth; social network; pandemic; social movements

Communication is strategic for social movements to gain supporters and mobilize society. With the popularization of social networks, the digital dimension has been identified as a fundamental space of dispute for the tensioning of debates held in the public sphere and power struggle by authors who study communication and social movements, such as Reis, Hostin and Peruzzo ( 2019) and Castells (2015). The cybernetic environment is, moreover, a territory massively occupied by young people. In 2020, with the Coronavirus disease (Covid-19), the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic and in a short time Brazil became one of the epicenters of the pandemic in the world, concentrating approximately half of the cases in the Latin America and Caribbean region. Studies regarding the communication of the health crisis due to covid-19 in Brazil point out that the discourse on the pandemic has become a territory of power dispute, with the media as one of the spaces of battle, and that the massive production of information on the subject, in the midst of a context of politicization and polarization, led to an “infodemic” phenomenon. In this sense, the pandemic has imposed a new reality on social movements and citizen participation of youth by prohibiting and restricting street protests and demonstrations as part of the disease prevention strategy. In this way, our study aims to understand the strategies used by a youth social movement to communicate with its young audience, issue information on the subject and mobilize this collective around emerging causes given the context of calamity. Our hypothesis is that the use of the internet, more specifically social networks, gained an even more relevant dimension as a means of communication for these mobilization networks to remain active. For this, we quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed the 3,713 original publications made by Levante Popular da Juventude on Twitter, between March and August 2020. Among the results found, we noticed that the movement adapted the agitation and propaganda strategies already used offline, mainly through coordinated actions to promote hashtags on a subject and live transmissions of political debates.