Frankfurt am Main, 29.9.2020 Post-factualism, Political Communication and the Role of Citizens Maria Paola Ferretti, Goethe University Frankfurt A revised draft is forthcoming in Virtues, Democracy, and Online Media: Ethical and Epistemic Issues Nancy E. Snow and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, editors, Routledge 2021 0. Introduction The problem that motivates this essay bears on the relationship between post-truth politics and the duties of citizenship in democratic society: Do citizens have a duty to resist post-factual beliefs? Recent discussion on post-truth politics has so far concentrated, among other aspects, on certain forms of deceptive communication based on post-factualism, such as ‘alternative facts’, for example in the form of fake news that are deemed a danger for democracy because they distort the political debate. Sometimes fake news and alternative facts are identified as means of political manipulation of democratic processes (as in the case of the campaigns for the US election of 2016, or the Brexit Referendum), or for discrediting political adversaries, or even for obstructing consensus on some proposal for policies that would improve, say, public health, as in the case of news supporting no-vax positions or Covid-19 denialism. In this context, citizens are portrayed mostly as the unwitting victims of post-truth politics by partisan media and state-backed propaganda. Citizens often reveal a tendency to hold post factual beliefs, that is beliefs that are not responsive to new information about facts, but are the result of credulity or blind faith. Such a post-factual attitude is such that many citizens disregard empirical conditions when forming their political beliefs. In this understanding, citizens are treated either as plainly ignorant, or tribally and uncritically attached to their political group and the version of facts that their group supports. In some cases, however, the partisanship of individual believers is