Een versplinterd publiek domein: Hoe sociale media het politieke debat transformeren

Abstract

Once, social media were heralded as means for emancipating citizens, for balancing power asymmetries and allowing common people to inform themselves and express their opinions. Today, we associate social media with fake news, hate speech and manipulative algorithms. After more than two decades of the World Wide Web, social media have emerged as powerful brokers of attention, channelling access to information and connecting audiences. The platform providers appear in parliamentary hearings as deceitful as they seem to be reluctant to fix their problematic services. After Brexit, Trump and the emergence of right-wing populism, policy makers and commentators argued that social media platforms undermine the open society through constituting filter bubbles and disseminating fake news and hate speech. This chapter explains how we went from being enthusiastic about social media to being disappointed. But it is not enough to blame social media platforms for the current situation. We have to look at the interplay of technological affordances and media practices, economic interests and institutional change. Looking at the notion of the public sphere and how it shaped our understanding of engaging in political debate and participating in an open society, this article critically revisits our far-fetched expectations of technology as an engine of democratic progress. Introducing the term of implicit participation, I show how social media platforms were successful in implementing media practices into easy-to-use interfaces and in channelling user activities. It cannot be emphasized enough that this constituted the engagement of large audiences indifferent to the inherent values of the public sphere and the open society. Rejecting the notion of the filter bubble, I show how users engage with media content and how mainstream media are engaging with social media. In conclusion, this chapter exposes the policy reactions to the perceived threats of fake news and hate speech as inappropriate, inefficient and actually damaging for the open society and the public sphere.