Wrecking the public sphere: The new authoritarians’ digital attack on pluralism and truth

Kopstein, Jeffrey

doi:10.1111/1467-8675.12620

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The post-2016 public disclosures about fake news, disinformation campaigns, Russian bots, micro targeting, voter suppression, the amplification of crazy conspiracies theories, the role of Cambridge Analytica, curating extremism, echo chambers, and the complete failure of most platforms even to know what was going on, let alone step in and moderate the free for all, was a shocking eye opener for the public (Chambers Kopstein, 2022). Even the least informed and engaged citizens would have been hard pressed not to have noticed the alarm bells ringing across the media landscape, has taken aim at rapacious platforms and the Big Tech moguls who run them as the primary villains in this narrative.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Trump and many similar authoritarian leaning populists have no interest in the public sphere as a space of pluralist debate. Indeed, they have an interest in wrecking its democratic function (Chambers Kopstein, 2022).…”

Section: Fragmentation and Privatizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a huge uptick in the amount of information accessible and a downtick in the quality of that information. This situation (and the fragmentation I discuss next) is then being exploited by bad actors to push political agendas via disinformation (Chambers & Kopstein, 2022). Disinformation, manipulation, and propaganda are endemic to all democratic public spheres.…”

Section: Digitalization Of the Public Spherementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Echo chambers and filter bubbles are not as widespread as some have feared (Chambers & Kopstein, 2022; Guess et al., 2018). In this respect, there is some good and some bad news.…”

Section: Fragmentation and Privatizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Communication in the public sphere is not directed toward consensus or producing a unified public will; it produces multiple and often conflicting opinions about a shared problem or salient concern. To the extent that the digital public sphere makes it impossible to have shared topics of conversation, it will be unable to perform its function as a clearing house for public opinion and will formation (Chambers & Kopstein, 2022).…”

Section: Digitalization Of the Public Spherementioning

confidence: 99%

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Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Chambers

2023

Constellations

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Political communication and opinion formation have always been central topics in democratic theory. Today, all eyes are on the new digital landscape and the ways that it is affecting these central elements of democracy. The diagnosis in both the popular press and scholarly research is that the digital revolution has been anything but good for democracy: "Today conventional wisdom holds that technologies have brought the world addictive devices, an omnipresent surveillance panopticon, racist algorithms, and disinformation machines that exacerbate polarization, threatening to destroy democracies from within" (Bernholz et al., 2021, p. 3). Assessing the threat of the present information revolution is especially relevant for theories of deliberative democracy that place communication and deliberation at the center of the democratic system.In this essay, I focus on Jürgen Habermas' version of deliberative democracy and the assessment of the digitalization of the public sphere that follows from it (Habermas 2022c). This assessment identifies fragmentation and privatization as the most serious threats to a properly functioning public sphere. While I agree that fragmentation and privatization are threats to the democratic function of public sphere, I question whether digitalization is their primary cause and suggest that we should be focusing on political actors who intentionally pursue strategies that fragment and polarize the public sphere. Thus, the culprit here is not so much technology and acquisitive platforms as authoritarian political elite intent on dulling the power of the public sphere to hold political actors to account. DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACYDeliberative democracy is a broad research paradigm. Very generally, it can be described as a "talk-centric" rather than "vote-centric" view of democracy (Chambers, 2003, p. 308) in which democracy is studied and evaluated "from the point of view of the quality of the processes through which individuals come to discuss, debate and mutually justify their respective stances before voting or taking other sorts of political action" (Scudder & White, 2023, p. 12).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Fragmentation and Privatizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Digitalization Of the Public Spherementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Echo chambers and filter bubbles are not as widespread as some have feared (Chambers & Kopstein, 2022; Guess et al., 2018). In this respect, there is some good and some bad news.…”

Section: Fragmentation and Privatizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Digitalization Of the Public Spherementioning

confidence: 99%

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Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Chambers

2023

Constellations

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Public Sphere

Lang

2023

International Encyclopedia of Civil Society

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Democracy: a modern definition for the library field

Buschman

2024

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PurposeDue to contemporary threats to democracy, the topic is highly prominent in news and social discourse. The Library and Information Science (LIS) field writes about democracy frequently and it is a core concept underwriting many common library practices, but it lacks a working definition of modern democracy. This article supplies a minimal definition of democracy specifically for LIS, and expands the concept to encompass a more empirically accurate concept of library roles in democratic societies that includes the sociology of democracy where libraries arguable play a more significant role.Design/methodology/approachThere is an unpacking of library assumptions about operating in democratic societies, an empirical survey of the conditions of modern democracy, and a baseline theoretical description of democratic functioning as it currently exists.FindingsA minimal definition of modern democracy situates library practices – and in some ways minimizes them. However, the role of culture – the sociology that democracy presumes – comes to prominence when the civil society role of libraries and the conditions of successful democratic functioning are examined.Originality/valueThere is now a minimal definition of democracy for LIS with this effort, but it needs expansion. In that sense, LIS is a leading example of the undertheorized role of the sociology that democracy presumes.

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Wrecking the public sphere: The new authoritarians’ digital attack on pluralism and truth

Cited by 6 publications

References 40 publications

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Public Sphere

Democracy: a modern definition for the library field

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