The Political Theory of the Digital Public Sphere: Conflict, Power, and Governance on Online Platforms

The public sphere is a central concept in democratic theory, and its transformations have been a lasting source of interest among political philosophers and social scientists. Digitalization of the public sphere has, similarly, had its fair share of scholarly attention in the last decade, particularly in political theorists’ work on the extent to which social media can cultivate democratic practices, how it influences the prospects of public deliberation, and what kind of political risks are posed by fake news and online post-truth discourses (Bruns & Highfield 2015; Forestal 2017; Chambers 2021). But while the digital public sphere is widely recognized as giving rise to new sets of questions for democratic politics, its study as a domain of conflict and governance remains undertheorized in normative political theory. More specifically, another set of important questions lends itself to analysis of the digital public sphere through the lens of conflictual power relations: i what is the nature of powers exercised by Big Tech corporations, and how do they shape public communication? ii do such powers induce democratic legitimacy deficits when they are held by private individuals? iii how does the problem of fake news and misinformation relate to political values other than deliberative ideals, such as order and political stability? iv how can normative conceptions of conflict and disagreement politically make sense of online polarization in a way that goes beyond mere consensus-seeking? v what does algorithmic power mean on online platforms, and how can algorithmic content moderations’ influence on free speech be made democratically accountable? What ties these questions together is their focus on conflict, power, and governance. In a way, this focus prioritizes the study of how the digital public sphere governs and is governed as a political institution. Some recent representatives of the power-centric approach include Stahl (2016), Muldoon (2022), and Aytac (2022), informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives including socialist thought, radical democratic theory, and republicanism. Others have also raised questions of governance by looking at how digital phenomena like fake news influence the legitimacy of our political institutions as a whole (Reglitz 2022). This Section aims to deepen these discussions in a methodologically pluralist way, and contribute to our understanding of the digital public sphere through the lens of power and governance structures in the context of widespread political conflict and disagreement.