The Privatisation of Political Participation in the Digital Age

In this paper we seek to conceptualise the structural conditions of political participation in democratic contexts in the digital era. We argue that in order to understand political participation and its development in the age of social media we need to go beyond rather deterministic questions of how tech influences participation. We equally need to avoid a single focus on the question of how people use social media/tech for political purposes. This focus eclipses commercial and political interests of powerful actors with influence over algorithmic strategies. Instead, there is a need for a conceptual framework to theorize the area of tension between technology, neoliberalism, and democracy. This paper approaches political participation in the digital age by going beyond the ‘technological determinism debate’, which has a depoliticising effect on understanding digital politics. Taking technology as structural force, we set out an interrelated set of issues contributing to what we understand as a form of privatisation of political participation. Firstly, we discuss the issue of ownership: the development of tech giants hosting much of human behaviour, including political participation. Democratic discourse is privately owned, subject to algorithmic strategies, i.e. an automatization of discourse, which can be easily adapted to different political interests, and with data often inaccessible to researchers. Secondly, we explore the question of social media content and the control of democratic discourse: political subjects on social media are not citizens but rather consumers and producers used for the extraction of data and prediction and commercialisation. Thirdly, we consider infrastructure as the new foundations of democratic discourse: ownership of digital (material) infrastructure in the hands of private actors and public-private partnerships reproduce Anglo-American colonial ideologies. We argue that political participation is undergoing a transformation toward privatisation in which tech is instrumentalised by private and political actors’ interest alignment. This is, however, a historically rooted process that has become particularly visible during the second Trump presidency.