Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere

Despite accumulating challenges, digital information and communication technologies retain considerable democratic potential. They have enabled movements, mass protests, and open-data initiatives in cities. But as we have all learned from the failures of an earlier wave of techno-utopianism, the democratic exploitation of technological affordances is deeply contingent—dependent on ethical conviction, political engagement, public regulation, and good design choices. In particular, and in the spirit of Habermas’ remark quoted at the outset, we think that the democratic potential will only be realized if participants in what we will be calling “the digital public sphere” deepen their sense of responsibility for how communication proceeds there.

A brief clarification: by “the digital public sphere,” we mean a public sphere in which discussion about matters of potentially shared concern is shaped in part by communication on online platforms (intermediaries that store users’ information and enable its public dissemination). Thus, the digital public sphere is neither everything that happens online or on online platforms (much of which is not discussion of matters of shared concern), nor is it only online. It is a public sphere in which communication on platforms plays an important role in shaping public discussion.

We will begin by sketching an idealized democratic public sphere, which marries inclusion and deliberation. Our current digitalized public sphere is dramatically more inclusive than the post-war mass media public sphere. But this expansion of inclusion has come at a substantial deliberative price. To improve the quality of public discussion, we focus on the responsibilities that participants must take on for the digital public sphere to be more democratically successful.

To be sure, participant action is insufficient. We and others have offered suggestions for the contributions of regulation, corporate responsibility, and the contributions of researchers, as well as civic and advocacy organizations. The European Union's new regulations on Intermediary Services, for example, the Digital Services Act, include requirements on illegal content and impose due diligence responsibilities on very large online platforms that will need to do audited systematic risk assessments and offer plans for remediation (Husovec & Roche Laguna, 2022). This approach has much to be said for it (though with the proliferation of generative models, it may be addressed to last year's problems). But because the digital public sphere has vastly expanded the aperture for contributions to discussion, and because we are uneasy about regulating the substance of public discussion, we are skeptical about proposals to turn public regulators or platforms (or any other agents) into editorial guardians.

Emphasizing participant responsibilities may give the appearance that we are at once blaming and burdening the victims of degraded public discussion. We resist that characterization. Instead, we focus here on the role of participants because they must become more capable and responsible if we are to retain the democratically attractive qualities of greater inclusion that the digital public sphere has brought. Relying solely on regulatory mechanisms, whether public or private, will create guardians over the practice of public communication. And such guardianship seems to give up on the democratic promise of self-government by consociates.

We begin with the idea of a democratic society whose free and equal members use their common reason to argue about the substance of public issues and in which the exercise of power is guided by that use. The animating idea is to marry broad opportunities for participation by members with their engagement about the merits of different courses of public action: to combine an inclusive democracy with public reasoning. Thus understood, democratic politics—as a discursive exercise of political autonomy—depends on informal, open-ended, fluid, dispersed public discussions of matters of common concern.

These conditions, which together describe a structure of equal, substantive communicative freedom, have far-reaching political, social, and economic implications. Equal standing in public reasoning requires favorable social background conditions, including limits on socioeconomic inequality and the dependencies associated with it. Similarly, the conjunction of rights and expression is in tension with concentrated private control of communicative opportunities.

These conditions are demanding. We lay them out explicitly in order to consider how the existence of a digitally mediated public sphere—in which platforms provide important informational and communicative infrastructure—bears on these conditions of a well-functioning democratic public sphere.

As we have argued elsewhere, digitalization of the public sphere has had decidedly mixed effects. In democratic societies and perhaps even in some authoritarian contexts, social media has increased the communicative power of those who previously lacked access to the means of mass communication. We see this inclusion not just in Q-Anon and “Stop the Steal,” but also in the Movement for Black Lives and #MeToo. The opportunities for expression and encountering diverse content have mostly increased with the radical expansion of chances for authorship. But these opportunities for many have constricted because among social media's affordances include the ease of suppressing others’ views through trolling, doxxing, and other forms of attack. Access to reliable information has in some ways increased. But deception, misinformation, and propaganda accompany this informational abundance, and it is not easy to sort between them.

Building a more democratic public sphere will require concerted action by, among others, governments, private companies, nongovernmental organizations, and citizens themselves. But in the remainder of this contribution, we focus on the responsibilities of individuals and groups who participate in the public sphere as authors, amplifiers, and readers because this aspect has received somewhat less attention. Indeed, many have been skeptical that individuals can rise to meet the challenges of public sphere digitalization or should even be asked or expected to do so.

Individuals have democratic responsibilities as authors, readers, listeners, viewers, and joiners and participants in collective communicative action. By dramatically reducing the costs of transmitting messages, the digital public sphere has increased the aperture of information and communication. If we wish to avoid reducing opportunities for expression and imposing significant hurdles on access to information, the digital public sphere will impose greater burdens on individuals and groups to distinguish information from manipulation, exercise greater restraint in deciding what to communicate, and sanction others who abuse these norms. Platforms and governments can help to enable that active, affirmative role.

Many of the democratic benefits of the mass media public sphere depended on journalists who embraced democratic norms and responsibilities (Hamilton, 2018). The organizations that employed them—as well as professional organizations—sometimes rewarded those democratic norms. Although the analogy of citizens and groups with professional journalists is very imperfect, internet companies should help users behave as citizens by designing their platforms to foster participants’ democratic orientation. They can also take responsibility for enhancing digital literacy by more explicitly recognizing that some sources are negligent about truth, by spreading habits of checking, and by encouraging users to encounter diverse perspectives.

But design is not enough; we will also need bottom-up efforts that elicit the right kind of engagement and content generation from users. Focusing, then, on truth and the common good, what do these norms imply for communicative responsibilities?

In both spheres of mass media and the digital public, the truth-seeking norm requires citizens (including in their role as authors) to be media literate in the sense that they can distinguish information from propaganda. The proliferation of sources and content makes that task more challenging and also more important. Aiding others’ opportunities for access to reliable information requires making some effort to check on the veracity of stories before liking or forwarding them and a disposition to resist amplifying messages that lack truth or undermine civility, even when that amplification is self-satisfying, in-group reinforcing, or profitable. Platforms can help by promoting content from reliable sources, offering tools that enable users to assess the veracity and trustworthiness of specific content and of their information diets in general, by rewarding—and enabling users to reward—truth-seeking behavior on their platforms and also by instructing users about the importance of epistemic humility. Teachers, as well as students of information and communication, could help by developing updated methods (such as attention to the quality of sources, cross-checking assertions, and awareness of confirmation bias) that enable citizens to better discern reliability and relevance in the digital environment.

Alternatively, consider the commitment to the common good. Although citizens disagree about what justice requires or the ends that society ought to pursue, a commitment to the common good requires citizens to resolve these differences on a basis that respects the equal importance of others.

Projecting this broad commitment into the digital public sphere, a common good orientation will often require citizens to avoid narrow news diets (Guess, 2021). It also requires citizens to be attentive to a broader array of information in order to be able to form views and make appropriate judgments. Doing that, in turn, requires learning about the interests, perspectives, and pain of others. A commitment to the common good thus requires citizens to inhabit parts of the digital public sphere that are common in the sense that they encounter information from diverse perspectives. Citizens should help create these common spaces by putting forth views and perspectives that appeal to across, as well as within, the bounds of identity, ideology, and community.

A range of other actors, including nongovernmental organizations, can contribute as well. Formal and popular education could help spread those methods widely. Second, such normative and prescriptive accounts ought to be part of civic education and socialization. Clear rules of thumb and expectations would help individuals direct their own attention and offer them an important ethical dimension of judgment and guide their expressions of approval or disapproval. Moreover, third-party organizations—analogous to independent organizations that have emerged around fake news and open educational resources—might call out content or users that violate norms or demote the priority of such posts on news feeds.

Some media critics suggest that the “golden age” of the mass media sphere in the second half of the twentieth century may have been a historical aberration, bracketed by periods of much greater misinformation, conspiracy theory, and uncivil conflict. While that period benefitted democratic governance in many ways, we should remember that it also limited the authors and speakers mostly to professional journalists reporting on political and business elites. And at least in the United States, the gatekeepers defended “consensus” visions of democratic capitalism, anti-communism, and US foreign policy. As the techno-optimists of the 1990s hoped, digitalization has broken the gates open, adding many more speakers and perspectives to the public sphere. But the quality is dismal, and it lacks orientations toward truth, common good, or civility.

Looking forward schematically, we may end up with incremental modifications of the status quo digital public sphere. Large platform companies would continue to dominate the design and policy of social media. Advertising and other business objectives would remain primary, with a little more subscription revenue and some responsiveness to the worst communicative excesses. Or we may end up with more determined regulation of the supply side of the public sphere—perhaps by algorithmically or legally (through requirements on risk assessment and stronger standards on intermediary liability) demoting or taking down stories deemed to be false or harmful and by increasing the proportion of content produced by professional, high-quality sources.

Whichever direction dominates, we think that fostering participant responsibilities must play a central role in remedying the deficiencies of the digital public sphere in order to capture some of the desirable qualities of the mass media public sphere—in particular production of reliable information and access to it—while preserving the gains in inclusiveness brought by the digital public sphere. This level of public responsibility will not be easy to achieve if it can be achieved at all. But we think it is worth trying because we are not yet ready to sacrifice the democratic ideal of substantively equal communicative freedom that would be lost. Nor do we think that a more expansive guardian role for regulated platforms is the best we can hope for.