The Platform Economy and Deliberation in the Digital Public Sphere. Developing a Two-Tier Analytical Framework for Deliberative Systems.

Social media platforms have become pivotal infrastructures of the digital public sphere, yet, unlike legacy media, they operate without comparable normative obligations and were never democratically legitimised for this role. While deliberative theorists have scrutinised their value for democratic discourse, the question of how the economic structures of platforms bear on the legitimacy of the digital public sphere remains underexplored. This paper operationalises the systemic turn of deliberative theory into a two-tier analytical framework: on the micro-tier, it assesses how a site contributes to the epistemic, ethical, and democratic functions of a deliberative system; on the macro-tier, it examines whether a site's deficiencies are legitimised or offset through deliberative delegation, systemic guardrails, and the balancing of defects. Applied to social media platforms, the framework reveals a constrained potential: their capacity to enable marginalised voices is largely independent of the platform economy, whereas the harms they inflict, such as disinformation, opaque curation, and unaccountable moderation, are largely a product of it.