Polarization and Fragmentation of European Public Spheres

One of the presumed hallmarks of post-truth politics is the breakdown of the public sphere in the deliberative sense of a shared communicative space where private citizens can debate matters of shared concern in public. In the digital age, the emergence of social and other digital media has created a constellation where such a shared communicative space is increasingly replaced by echo chambers of like-minded people on social media, providing a fertile breeding ground for the dissemination of fake news and other forms of mis- and disinformation. However, post-truth politics also highlights the immensely contested character of the concept of truth, as populist politicians promote and at the same time exploit the idea of a fundamental distinction between popular truths and the lies propagated by corrupt liberal elites, including the institution of (quality) journalism. The aim of this paper is to analyze the extent of polarization and of the fragmentation of the public sphere in the digital/postfactual age. The paper starts by presenting an analytical framework for the study of such processes and then applies it to the analysis of debates on the Russian invasion of Ukraine in three European countries. In drawing on the actor and arena dimensions of post-truth politics, the paper highlights the importance of the question of where such debates have taken place and what the respective roles of traditional/mainstream/legacy media and social/digital media has been. More specifically, the paper asks about the dominant understandings of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in mainstream and non-mainstream media, but also analyzes the extent to which debate across these two sets of arenas has taken place. Finally, the paper reflects on what the empirical findings mean for the current state of the public sphere in the digital age in Europe.