A democracy, if we can keep it. Remarks on J. Habermas’ a new structural transformation of the public sphere

Habermas's new book, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,¹ offers a timely and insightful analysis of the threats that online communication poses to the maintenance of an inclusive public sphere in democratic societies. Amid growing discontent with democracy, there are plenty of reasons to be worried about the increasing deterioration of the political public sphere. In addition to long-standing threats such as the excessive influence of money in political discourse, the potential for manipulation by powerful social groups, and the exclusion of marginalized voices from public discourse, technological innovations such as social media platforms and big data collection are generating new types of threats.

These threats are being generated more quickly than society's ability to cope with them. The business model of social media platforms is based on maximizing user engagement through data harvesting and algorithmic personalization. The preselection of content for users based on data about their past preferences facilitates the creation of filter bubbles and echo chambers with the consequence that those who rely mainly on social media almost never receive information, news, or opinions that they do not already agree with. These features of social media not only increase group isolation, fragmentation, and polarization but also facilitate the dissemination of misinformation, fake news, conspiracy theories, and the micro-targeted manipulation of voters.

Amid these threatening developments, we are seeing a decline in traditional media outlets that operate under journalistic norms of impartiality, accuracy, accountability, and so on. Consequently, it is unclear how citizens can stay sufficiently politically informed to engage in meaningful debate with their fellow citizens, even on the most fundamental political problems facing them. At this historical juncture, the danger that a shared sense of community among the citizenry disappears seems alarmingly real. Yet, democratic self-government is only possible if citizens can forge a collective political will by changing one another's hearts and minds in public debate. Without an inclusive public sphere, citizens cannot keep the democracies they have got.²

This concern is at the core of Habermas's analysis of the role of social media communication in bringing about a new structural transformation of the public sphere. Indeed, Habermas identifies the inclusive character of the public sphere as the feature that is most in danger of “disappearing” due to the centrifugal forces of social media communication which yield increased fragmentation, polarization, misinformation, and so on.³ I share Habermas's concern. I am convinced by his analysis of the distinctive threats that social media communication poses to the maintenance of an inclusive public sphere. I also agree with the two main mechanisms that he identifies as most promising for minimizing such threats over the long term: regulations and learning processes. However, I fear that there are some limits to the effectiveness of these mechanisms that Habermas does not discuss.

In what follows, I offer a brief overview of Habermas's analysis in order to highlight some of these limits. Although I agree with Habermas that a better distribution of responsibilities between social media platforms and users is urgently needed, I argue that it may nonetheless be insufficient for preventing an increased fragmentation of the public sphere (1). This raises the question of whether there are any alternative developments that can help counteract the negative effects of fragmentation and polarization on the political public sphere in democratic societies. As a tentative answer, I briefly explore the potential contribution that citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative minipublics may make to the maintenance of an inclusive political public sphere (2).

Habermas is certainly right to suggest that it is going to take a long time for Internet users to acquire the skills and the media literacy required to properly participate in digitized communication as authors. This hope about learning processes may partly explain why he takes a less skeptical attitude toward this new structural transformation of the public sphere than he did toward the previous one in his groundbreaking 1962 work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.⁴ I agree that we should have a hopeful attitude and avoid misplaced nostalgia for the pre-digital era of traditional media outlets. Yet, there is a worrisome dis-analogy between the two technological revolutions that is relevant in our context. Whereas the bulk of the population simply could not participate in mass communication before learning how to read, Internet users were turned into authors overnight. They are participating in mass communication as authors before acquiring any of the requisite media literacy and without any proper regulations. A better analogy would be letting everyone drive on the highway before passing a driving test and without any traffic regulations. We may not have 300 years to fix the ensuing mess!

Leaving this issue aside, I am also not sure that the main threats to the political public sphere derive from the transformation of readers into authors. In fact, the flipside of this phenomenon seems to be much more salient. The most significant threats are posed by the fact that the new social media operators are no longer authors. As Habermas recognizes, social media platforms “neither produce, nor edit nor select.” They thereby disclaim any responsibility for the consequences of the spread of content that is “unregulated because professional filters are lacking” (p. 159). This is a problematic feature that social media operators share with the gig economy generally. In the same way that social media platforms are “empowering all potential users in principle to become independent and equally entitled authors” (Habermas, 2022b, p. 159), platforms like Uber or Lift are “empowering” gig workers to become independent contractors. The flipside of that “empowerment” is that these platforms are no longer “employers” and can therefore relinquish any responsibility for providing labor protections to gig workers, although the latter cannot secure those protections on their own.⁵ The main problem with making social media users “authors” or gig workers “independent contractors” is that responsibilities are offloaded onto them under conditions in which they cannot properly discharge them.

In the case of social media, the problem is not simply that platform users do not have the professional skills and media literacy to properly fulfill the various authorship roles involved in online communication (from editors to reporters, journalists, witnesses, whistleblowers, and so on). This is certainly a problem. But no matter how much social media users improve their authorship skills, there is a clear structural limit. Social media users are also always at the same time passive recipients. Yet, because of the current business model, content spreads across social media according to algorithms that maximize user engagement rather than accuracy. Consequently, targeted recipients often have no way to discern whether the content that appears in their “feeds” is accurate or false, whether it represents the views of fellow citizens or foreign trolls, whether it is generated by a reliable source or by an online bot using a fake account, and so on.⁶ To the extent that this is the case, platform users cannot be held responsible for preventing the negative consequences of the spread of misinformation and disinformation, although they certainly contribute to it by sharing, liking, commenting, and so on. Since ought implies can, it is not surprising that online platforms’ creative attempts to relinquish any responsibility are meeting strong resistance. This fight is ongoing. Yet, whereas labor protections for gig workers are still being fought about intensely, content moderation by social media platforms is already here to stay.⁷ Devastating incidents like Facebook's role in inciting genocidal violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have brought social media companies under increasing public pressure. Consequently, these companies have not been able to simply declare themselves “platforms” and their users “authors” as a way of relinquishing their obligation to act as responsible editors and remove harmful content and misinformation from their sites.⁸

Now, I do not mean to suggest that leaving content moderation in the hands of private businesses is an optimal solution to the problem. Far from it. But state regulation of content has problems of its own. In addition to the well-known dangers of state censorship, state agencies or courts could hardly adjudicate the tremendous amount of content that platforms remove each day while also maintaining due process guarantees of legal recourse for users.⁹ A third alternative (with its own set of problems) would be enabling users themselves to control the content that appears in their “feeds.” This would require the development of technical means (so-called “middleware”) to restrict access to unwanted content (Keller, 2022). Currently, it is unclear what the best solutions might be. The problems are complex and constantly evolving due to technological innovations. Each regulatory option carries the risk of having severe negative effects on the quality of the public sphere. Precisely because of this, it is clear that what citizens need to learn about online communication is not so much how to behave as authors but, above all, how to behave as citizens.

In democratic societies, citizens are ultimately responsible for demanding adequate regulation of any new technologies and practices that threaten the equal protection of everyone's fundamental rights and freedoms. This does not mean, however, that at this historical juncture, the responsibilities of citizenship vis-à-vis the social media are any easier to discharge than those of online authorship. To the contrary, Habermas’ observation is correct here too. It is likely to take a long time for citizens to learn how to best regulate the communicative practices enabled by new forms of social media so that their beneficial features are enhanced while their disruptive potential is neutralized. However, in this context, it is also important to note that a lot of the threats that Habermas rightly highlights are neither exclusive nor distinctive of social media. Citizens must demand that any media (whether traditional or digitized) is responsible for not spreading disinformation and misinformation. This is not only happening with respect to social media platforms. It is also happening with respect to TV news channels and other outlets. To take just one salient example: TV news was the main source of early Covid-19 misinformation in the United States. Facebook ranked second.¹⁰

Contrary to Habermas's diagnosis, my fear is that although these problems are certainly exacerbated by social media, they are not a product of the unskilled behavior of Internet users bumbling about in the role of authors. In fact, the polarized and self-segregating mentality that Habermas refers to does not seem to be limited to Internet users at all. The question at stake here is whether online communication is generating these problems or whether users are reproducing online what they do (and always already did) offline.¹¹ This is an important question. If the social and political fragmentation that takes place in online networks simply reflects the fragmentation of social networks that results from citizens’ free choices in their offline lives (e.g., where people prefer to live, who they like to talk to and engage with, which news channels they prefer to watch, etc.), it is far from clear that regulations on social media or increased media literacy can address such problems. To once again take an example from the United States: recent studies show that a much higher percentage of Americans are politically segregated through television news channels than through online platforms. Television is indeed the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans.¹² Moreover, even if it turns out that social media decisively exacerbates the problem, it is also not clear that there is a regulatory mechanism that is compatible with citizens’ freedoms which can impede voluntary online self-segregation (and the ensuing fragmentation, polarization, etc.) any more than there is a mechanism to impede voluntary self-segregation offline (e.g., to regulate citizens’ choices of traditional media outlets, neighborhoods, and schools).

The concerning levels of fragmentation and polarization in most democratic societies may be caused by a variety of concurrent factors: a sharp increase in social inequality produced by decades of neoliberal capitalism, a corresponding erosion of solidarity, and the emergence of social media. Whatever the ultimate causes of social fragmentation and polarization are far from clear that increasing media literacy or regulating social media platforms can suffice to address the tendencies of an increasing portion of the citizenry to self-segregate both online and offline. This is not to deny that we need to regulate social media in order to counteract the role that algorithm personalization plays in facilitating the creation of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Nor do I mean to suggest that increasing media literacy and providing Internet users with suitable tools to control the content they are exposed to is not urgently needed. However, to the extent that fragmentation and polarization are not a uniquely online phenomena but something that permeates all aspects of society both online and offline, improving online communication will not be enough to maintain an inclusive public sphere.¹³ We need additional tools to counteract the negative effects that fragmentation and polarization exert upon the political public sphere.

In this context, the increasing popularity of citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative minipublics such as citizens’ juries and Deliberative Polls is not surprising.¹⁴ Indeed, the inclusiveness that is characteristic of these deliberative fora provides participants with the exact opposite experience of an echo chamber or a polarized political debate. Without suggesting that these institutional innovations could be a panacea, I would like to briefly indicate some specific contributions that they could make toward maintaining an inclusive political public sphere if they were properly institutionalized.

Political debates in the public sphere tend to be dominated by powerful political actors whose interests often deviate from those of the general public. As mentioned, this has only gotten worse with the spread of social media that facilitates the formation of filter bubbles and echo chambers. In the current media environment, citizens have a hard time not only getting themselves informed (as opposed to being bombarded with fake news, misinformation, conspiracy theories, etc.) but, even more importantly, figuring out the considered opinions of their fellow citizens on important political questions—especially those of citizens with whom they disagree. Citizens frequently cannot tell if the views they are exposed to reflect the genuine oppositional opinions of fellow citizens who disagree with them or whether they reflect the manipulated opinions of powerful actors with particular interests that in no way resonate with the citizenry (e.g., lobbyists, hackers, Internet bots, and foreign governments trolls).

In such a context, it is not surprising that scholars and practitioners who are familiar with the workings of citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative minipublics are enthusiastic about the quality of political deliberation that they facilitate for participants both online and offline. Minipublics facilitate well-informed, high-quality deliberation on important political decisions among a randomly selected sample of citizens that is descriptively representative of the constituency which will be subject to that decision. Indeed, across all relevant dimensions—inclusion, diversity, access to reliable and balanced information, independence, impartiality, orientation toward the public interest, and so on—the deliberative conditions available to minipublics’ participants are the exact opposite of those that prevail in most social forums currently available to citizens. Thus, it does not seem far-fetched to imagine that as more and more citizens become familiar with the workings of minipublics, they would become increasingly enthusiastic about them. Indeed, if deliberative minipublics were institutionalized for a variety of purposes at the local, national, and even transnational levels, they could become an extremely valuable resource to the citizenry precisely at a time when reliable sources of inclusive, well-informed, impartial political deliberation are getting harder and harder to come by.¹⁵ How could minipublics help improve the inclusiveness and the quality of deliberation in the public sphere?

To begin with, minipublics could serve some important functions that are not very different from those that traditional media outlets (used to) fulfill. As with the latter, their contribution as a resource for the citizenry would not consist of doing the thinking or deciding for them.¹⁶ Rather, it would consist of making the most relevant arguments for and against policies under discussion readily available to citizens.¹⁷ Minipublics can do so by filtering out irrelevant or patently manipulative considerations that cannot survive public scrutiny while highlighting the key information, potential trade-offs, and long-term consequences of the available alternatives as evaluated from the diverse political perspectives that resonate with the citizenry of a political community at a given time.

Minipublics are particularly well suited to serve this function. Precisely to the extent that their randomly selected participants are a mirror of the whole citizenry, the reasons and considerations that lead them to form their considered judgments are likely to be those that resonate with the rest of the citizenry (Fishkin, 2018, p. 72). Moreover, by highlighting the considerations that are most relevant for reaching a considered judgment on the political issue in question, minipublics would not only serve the function of reducing the costs of acquiring that type of information to the public. They would also serve the crucial function of sorting out the “wheat from the chaff,” that is, the information that reflects the considered views of some citizens as opposed to the many distorting claims that are strategically deployed to subvert rather than inform and which are therefore unsustainable in the face of deliberative scrutiny (Niemeyer, 2014, p. 14). By testing the available arguments and providing their considered judgments to their fellow citizens, minipublics could play a constructive role in structuring public discourses. Minipublics could act as a regulator of information in the public sphere by doing the hard work of sorting through arguments and providing reasons for the resulting positions to the remainder of the public. Moreover, due to their inclusiveness, minipublics are not only able to identify acceptable public arguments, but they can also help publicize the concerns of marginalized groups that hardly ever find a voice among the most influential political actors.

Here, it is important to highlight that minipublics’ participants are as diverse as the citizenry itself and are therefore as likely to disagree in their considered opinions on contested political issues as the rest of the citizenry does. However, this does not make minipublics useless. On the contrary, they can provide crucial information to the citizenry if their reasoning and recommendations are made widely available. Knowing the interests, values, and lines of reasoning that resonate with our fellow citizens with respect to contentious political issues is essential precisely in cases when we disagree. For knowing the genuine sources of contention and disagreement on specific political issues—as opposed to the manipulative claims and pseudo-arguments that constantly circulate in the public sphere—would enable citizens to figure out the kind of information, evidence, arguments, or counterarguments that they would need to provide to their fellow citizens in order to move the public debate on these issues forward. This is precisely what citizens can no longer do in an increasingly fragmented and polarized public sphere.