ABSTRACT
The rise of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and so on, and of new technologies such as AI and AR has fundamentally altered the landscape of democratic deliberation and of electoral politics. With industry forecasts projecting digital political-ad spending to top $2.7 billion before Election Day in the US 2020 presidential elections, we are witnessing a head-on collision between the so-called free market, unregulated social media, and democratic politics. The oversight on political ads by social media companies is light or inexistent, with inaccuracies and outright lies often passing muster and hence reaching millions of voters. The spread of disinformation and hoaxes, the exponentiality of biases through algorithmic targeting, and the lack of formal accountability of executives at these companies dislocate political power from hemicycles into boardrooms. Without transparency, accountability, and basic standards of rationality, can we still talk about the public sphere as meaningfully shaping democratic decisions? Gertrud Koch will consider how to rethink the public sphere in this context and shed light on what the future of democracy might look like.
