The Automated Public Sphere

Abstract

This chapter describes the documented, negative effects of online propagandists’’ interventions in both electoral politics and the broader public sphere. It then proposes several legal and educational tactics to mitigate their power, or to encourage or require them to exercise it responsibly. The chapter offers a concession to the suspicious of governmental intervention in the public sphere: some regimes are too authoritarian and generally unreliable to be trusted with extensive powers of regulation over media, or intermediaries. Regulators need to be able to understand how some racist or anti-Semitic groups and individuals are manipulating search and social media feeds. The US election featured deeply disturbing stories about manipulation of social media for political ends. The chapter concludes that the inadvisability of extensive media regulation in disordered societies only makes the agenda more urgent in well-ordered societies, lest predictable pathologies of the automated public sphere accelerate the degradation of their democracies.