International audience This paper brings an analysis of public comments left by followers of costarrican news site CRHoy, in the aftermath of Gonzalo Ramirez’s election as President of Congress. It looks to identify implicit norms and codes of online expression regarding public affairs, as well as to describe the main tendencies within the spontaneously formed opinions of users. We gathered all publications of CRHoy on Facebook thanks to a free software app, Netvizz; we then performed quantitative and qualitative analyses based on a sample of comments. One rather counter-intuitive finding we make is that these comments comply with several requirements of normative theories of public space.