Platforms as Mediators of Privilege in Politics: A New Typology of Emerging Online Counterpublics

The recent rise of racist, antifeminist and climate change denying discourses online, formed by groups that claim to be marginalized from mainstream publics, raises new issues of how we can analyze the role of digital platforms in the reproduction of power and privilege in public debates. This contribution argues that we need to direct the analytical focus towards how the materiality of digital platforms mediates power differentials between and within groups that are promulgating counterdiscourses. First, it is shown how these discourses, which are formed by loosely connected members through communication, can be understood as counterpublics. The emergence of counterpublics has traditionally been understood as offering the possibility for historically marginalized groups to come together and challenge dominant public discourses. The concept of counterpublics has therefore often been used interchangeably with historically marginalized groups and communities. In order to also enable an analysis of how historically privileged groups can come together and formulate counterdiscourses in order to preserve, or reinforce, their own position, a broader and more specified typology of counterpublics is developed. In contrast to a previous focus on the content of counterpublics’ discourses, this typology also takes in to account counterpublics’ social- as well as political base for exclusion from mainstream publics. This analytical shift becomes important not least in light of the rise of a multitude of digital public venues. These present great opportunities for privileged groups who perceive themselves as increasingly politically marginalized from dominant publics. In addition, the openness of these venues may enable relationally privileged groups within counterpublics to hijack political conversations. To include the materiality of platforms into the analysis, the typology is related to how the affordances of digital platforms make new opportunities available to different kinds of counterpublics. Lastly, the usefulness of this approach is briefly illustrated by two empirical studies of online counterpublics: The first analyzes the emergence of an antifeminist counterpublic on Swedish political blogs, formed in reaction to the great advancements for gender equal policy in Sweden during the last decades. The second explores the power differentials within the Twitter hashtag #solidarityisforwhiteowmen, started by women of color as a direct critique of how their voices have been marginalized within mainstream feminism.