The main objectives of this article are to understand the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic affected the streaming of city council meetings on social media networks and whether, having this effect existed, it has persisted over time. A complementary objective is to find if there are particular characteristics of municipalities that favor the streaming of city council meetings on social media networks. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study to address these objectives. To achieve them, data were collected and analyzed from all 308 Portuguese municipalities. These included the registration of 4905 streams published on Facebook and YouTube, corresponding to 2639 city council meetings from 74 municipalities, held between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2022. The main findings are: the number of Portuguese municipalities that streamed their city councils in each month more than doubled during the acute phase of the pandemic; this effect started to fade immediately after the easing of the pandemic; and it started to grow again immediately after the September 2022 municipal elections. The main theoretical implication is that disruptive events such as sanitarian crises and local elections can trigger the adoption of innovative forms of the use of social media networks by municipalities, namely those related to transparency, such as streaming city councils. The study also contributes to confirm population size, voter turnout, and margin of victory as relevant determinants of online transparency at the local level.