joellene's digi-journal

Search

SearchSearch

digital platform-based public sphere

Jul 08, 202413 min read

Originally written as a final essay for UC Berkeley’s Media Studies 113: Media & Democracy

As our communication now increasingly occurs online and on social media, the digital realm now plays an incredibly important role in facilitating political discourse and free speech, leading some scholars to coin terms such as the digital “networked public sphere”. However, I forward that this wide acceptance of the internet as a boon for the public sphere as a concept, is premised upon the assumption that online platforms are neutral mediums for public discourse. In actuality, these platforms are governed by profit-driven companies that have unprecedented power in determining the conditions for access to information and online public spaces, which goes unchallenged when they are not perceived as stewards of public spheres. This is because of a deeply-internalized split between the economic and the political, and the private and the public, that must be resolved both discursively and structurally.

The Public Sphere

The public sphere is an underpinning of deliberative democracy, where individuals engage in productive dialogue to reach rational consensus on political and social issues (Habermas, 1962). More recently, it has been updated by scholar Peter Dahlgren to be: “a constellation of communicative spaces in society that permit the circulation of information, ideas, debates— ideally in an unfettered manner—and also the formation of political will” (2005:148). Similarly, Benkler et al. update Habermas’ original work in the digital era, to the ‘networked’ public sphere as “an alternative arena for public discourse and political debate, an arena that is less dominated by large media entities, less subject to government control, and more open to wider participation” (2013:5). Both Benkler and Dahlgren positively characterize this online ecosystem of communication channels as more diverse than previous iterations of the public sphere, because it makes participating in discourse more accessible, and decentralizes gatekeeping power away from broadcast media conglomerates that sit at the center of hub-and-spoke media networks. Of course, it must be noted that both scholars’ analysis of the online public sphere is limited to the ‘blogosphere’, specifically regarding websites and blogs related to politics across ideological divides — perhaps because of the time period they were writing in. Today, most people’s online lives are largely lived on social media, which provides three specific technological affordances: intermediation of user-generated content (UGC), direct user-user and user-content interaction, and the ability of an individual user to articulate network connections with other users (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015).

Even if we were to understand social media within this ‘blogosphere’ paradigm, I argue that it would still fail to interrogate the role platform companies play in providing the technical infrastructure for the affordances above, as anything more than apolitical — and therefore assumes that the discourse on these platforms is entirely organic and unmediated. In truth, under the veneer of being mere ‘technology companies’ — in Mark Zuckerberg’s words (Pickard, 2019) — platforms constitute and moderate the entirety of the public sphere. Tapping on Dahlgren’s three dimensions of the public sphere, UGC platform companies like Meta, Twitter, Google and so on are the media companies of the structural dimension; they host the output of UGC that make up the representational dimension; and that UGC then facilitates user interaction, constituting the interactive dimension. In hosting the public spheres themselves, platforms thus have an inordinate amount of power, which is manifest in two ways: ‘hard’ control over what is allowed on the platform, and algorithmic ‘soft’ control over what users are likely or unlikely to see. 

‘Hard’ control

Here, an entity that provides the technical infrastructure for the public sphere can determine the conditions of access to it.

For example, during the 2012 London Olympic Games, Twitter controversially suspended the personal account of a journalist who had criticized NBC’s coverage of the games and tweeted the email address of an NBC executive (Shapiro, 2012). At the time, Twitter was in a cross-promotional partnership with NBC for the period of the Olympics, such that it was possible that Twitter had intervened in the representational dimension of its online public sphere to protect its economic interests (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015). This is not to say that Twitter always exercises this power for profit reasons; it did suspend Trump in 2021 for inciting violence after the January 6 US Capitol attack (Twitter, 2021). Instead, the takeaway is that there is no legally-enforced, underlying principle consistency to the commercial content moderation policies undertaken by digital platform companies. In other words, “social media platform policies and technical design choices serve as a form of privatized governance directly enacting rights and regulating the flow of information online” (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015:2). 

‘Soft’ Control

Even if a given piece of content is allowed on a platform, its reach is determined by a new set of actors that sculpt online discourse with ‘soft’ power: algorithms. Benkler et al. stated that the networked public sphere “highlights stories and sources based on relevance and credibility” (2013:5). However, this agenda-setting function is performed by algorithms, [characterized by scholar Karen Yeung as ‘hypernudging’](by scholar Karen Yeung as ‘hypernudging’.). This refers to the highlighting of algorithmically determined correlations in online behavioral data, allowing for the dynamic configuration of each user’s informational choice context to intentionally influence their decisions (Yeung, 2017). This is clearly seen in a political mobilization ‘experiment’ conducted by Facebook during the 2010 US congressional elections where they trialed informational messages (“Tell your friends you voted”) versus social messages (“Jaime Settle, Jason Jones, and 18 other friends have voted”) delivered to 61 million users. They discovered that “the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and realworld voting behaviour of millions of people” (Bond et al., 2012), but in doing so directly impacted real democratic processes. As such, every single instance of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. is curated, to the extent that it is simply impossible for a digital public sphere hosted on these platforms to go unmediated, leading scholar Stuart Geiger to coin the term ‘algorithmic public sphere’ (2009).

In both forms of power above, it becomes clear that so-called technology companies have power not only to determine conditions for participation in the public spheres they host, but also to insidiously influence individuals’ behavior and democratic actions. These are deeply structural issues, which Pickard, in his work on misinformation, attributes to “an abiding faith in technological liberation and a tendency to naturalize market forces” (2019:45). This could be rephrased to be a ‘marketplace of ideas’ paradigm of social media, taking neoliberal assumptions about market economics and applying them to online information flows — such that the current incarnation of online platforms “sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity”, when it is in fact fraught with the power relations discussed above (Monbiot, 2016). In terms of solving this, it seems that a discursive reorientation is needed, such as Pickard’s advocacy for articulating that news media are public services and not commodities (2019). 

Public vs Private / Citizen vs Consumer

However, I argue that identifying the ‘marketplace of ideas’ paradigm as neoliberal, reveals that this reorientation would be harder than Pickard makes it seem. Crucially, neoliberalism “redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling” (Monbiot, 2016). It redefines the public sphere as a service to be used, as Meta clearly states in a blogpost defending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act: that it helps “companies like Meta to provide the type of services that people enjoy using every day” (Newstead, 2023). Relevantly, Section 230 bestows legal immunity onto online platform companies from being held liable for UGC, while permitting them to moderate that same content — it was this law that allowed Twitter to ban both a journalist and a violence-inciting ex-President for entirely different reasons. It is an encapsulation of the neoliberal assumptions regarding online platforms: if these are companies providing services, then hosting UGC is a service, and so is content moderation, banning, recommendation and curation (see: Gonzalez v Google). In this frame, companies have no obligations beyond ensuring profit through keeping users satisfied, and Pickard’s recommendation for “demanding more social responsibilities” from them will have no effect (2019:47). 

Pushing further, I forward that the deepest issue lies in a neoliberal division between citizen and consumer, in the same vein as Martha Ackelsberg’s work on the division between public and private, and the political and economic. Ackelsberg reveals historical assumptions of citizenship as something acted out in the public domain, such that those involved in the domestic spheres of life — women, slaves, etc. — were not citizens (2009). In our online spaces, there is little preventing an individual from creating an account and interacting with content and other users. However, individuals step into these spaces as ‘users’, to consume content and use a service provided by a company. In other words, they discursively leave the public domain when they log on, because citizenship is something acted out via voting or attending political rallies in real life, and not in the private activity of content consumption.

This framing also obscures platform companies’ infrastructural influence. In the same way that the employment contract conjures a seemingly egalitarian relationship of free exchange between the employer and the worker, the terms of service from a company like Meta does the same between a platform and a user — and, similarly, this relationship is “personalizing or privatizing the social relations of capitalism” (Ackelsberg, 2009:123), removing them from the public sphere and relegating them to the private. For the worker, this fiction creates the illusion that they are still independent as they are free to labor in exchange for wages; for the platform user, this is an illusion of independent, unmediated consumption, obscuring the counter-flowing influence of hypernudges and algorithmic agenda-setting of the platform ‘service’. This divide between the economics of consumption and politics of citizenship causes the workers that Ackelsberg is writing about to be split between two different sets of rights, unable to make demands for relief from the excesses of capitalism (2009). Similarly, individuals logging on to Meta are not able to articulate their consumer-citizen-ness and cannot make political demands as users to address their relationship to platforms, algorithms and their companies, particularly under laws like Section 230. 

Reorient → Citizens! Public goods!

As such, a discursive reorientation is needed, but deeper than the one that Pickard suggests. Beyond calling these platforms public services, we must articulate them as public spheres in and of themselves and give that legal weight, because “cybercitizens can only come into being and develop rights and duties alongside some parallel cybercommunity” (Plummer, 2003:56). Beyond recognizing digital, algorithmically-governed platforms as public spheres, we must also hold space for networked public spheres as a “complex interaction of publics, online and offline, all intertwined”, as seen in the role Facebook played as a democratic leveller during the 2011 Arab Spring (Tufekci, 2017:6). Within the democratic social movements that kickstarted the Arab Spring, digital social connectivity facilitated by platforms like Facebook gave birth to offline street protests, which in turn allowed people with dissenting ideas to find each other and then connect online (disputable in hindsight?). Citizenship, therefore, becomes a constant characteristic whether an individual is online or offline, combatting the user-consumer frame perpetuated by neoliberal imaginaries and technological utopianism. 

How can we ensure that this reorientation towards Plummer’s cybercitizenship is sustainable? Radical structural changes are needed, where instead of letting platforms host content, we shift and centralize power back in cybercitizens’ hands. A possible paradigm for this would be the Social Link Data (SOLID) protocol. It defines containers of personal data — ‘data pods’ — such that any platform requesting that data needs to undergo standardized authentication mechanisms and access control policies contingent on the approval of the individual. Individuals thus control access to their own data and can “determine for themselves whether an entity requesting to access the data has a legal basis to use the data in a particular way” (Esposito et al., 2022). Instead of having fragmented identities across different platforms, each holding a different incarnation of personal and behavioral data, individuals control all their data in a centralized space and Facebook, Instagram, etc. would need to request for access to that space each time. This may make it easier for people to see themselves as a whole identity across the current political/economic and public/private divides, such that they can more effectively make demands in the face of platforms’ gatekeeping and algorithmic powers. Of course, this protocol is but one way to shift power away from platforms and towards cybercitizens — the point being that structural changes must be pushed through, in order to disrupt the infrastructural power platform companies have as hosts of digital public spheres.

Looping back round to Dahlgren and Benkler, we realize that interrogation of the technical infrastructure of their conceptualizations of the digital public sphere only revealed the power asymmetry between platforms and users, hidden under the veneer of a neoliberal ‘marketplace of ideas’ and apolitical corporate libertarianism. Instead, a discursive disruption to the divide between online and offline, private and public, and consumer and citizen is necessary in order to truly empower cybercitizens to view the spaces and communities they have found for themselves online to be true public spheres. And these public spheres will only truly flourish with changes to the very technical infrastructure of digital platforms, such as by centralizing information with individuals instead of on platforms.

Bibliography 

Graph View

Backlinks