Abstract
This paper reconsiders the claim made by mainstream internet platforms that they inherently foster a democratic public sphere, offering reasons why the opposite may be true. It surveys past studies that have supported both views, showing how the position taken by scholars tends to depend on their disciplinary perspectives. Historically, scholarly approaches to the public or political impacts of the internet and social media have been characterised by four main interpretative lenses: technodeterminism, behaviourism, and the prioritising of either ideology, or the economics of media ownership. This article pays particular attention to the last two, and to Facebook, which among mainstream internet platforms has notably associated itself with democratic ideals. The article describes how many of the democratic ideals associated with Facebook’s impacts on society are in fact reversed by the platform’s practices, with effects that directly contradict the platform’s stated principles. The article ends by suggesting that Facebook consciously pretends to favour the public sphere, and that such Orwellian doublethink is a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from its augmentation of private and personal issues at the expense of collective engagement and empowerment. designed differently, Facebook could have had favourable impacts.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Apel К-O (1980) Towards a transformation of philosophy. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
Barberá P, Jost JT, Nagler J, Tucker JA, Bonneau R (2015) Tweeting from left to right: Is online political communication more than an echo chamber? Psychological science 26(10):1531–1542
Bauman Z (2006) Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Polity; 1st edition, 188 pp
Beck U (1996) The reinvention of politics. Rethinking modernity in the global social order. Polity Press, Cambridge
Benkler Y (2006) Wealth of networks. Yale University Press, London
Boyd-Barrett O (2003) The political economy approach. Approaches to media: a reader. Arnold, London, pp 186–192
Cadwalladr C (2019) Facebook’s role in Brexit and the threat to democracy. TED talk Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_facebook_s_role_in_brexit_and_the_threat_to_democracy?language=en
Castells M (2010) The rise of the network society. Wiley-Blackwell, Singapore
Constine J (2012) How big is Facebook’s data? 2.5 billion pieces of content and 500+ terabytes ingested every day. Techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2012/08/22/how-big-is-facebooks-data-2-5-billion-pieces-of-content-and-500-terabytes-ingested-every-day/. Accessed July (2019)
Constine J (2016) Facebook hits 100M hours of video watched a day, 1B users on groups, 80M on Fb Lite Techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/facebook-grows/. Accessed July (2019)
Dahlgren P (2007) Young citizens and new media: learning for democratic participation. Routledge, New York
Dalton RJ, Farrel DM, Jou W (2011) Popular conceptions of the meaning of democracy: democratic understanding in unlikely places. US Irvine. Center for the Study of Democracy Working Papers
Data Policy (2016) Web.Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20160318055917/https://www.facebook.com/full_data_use_policy. Accessed August (2019)
Dean J (2009) Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: communicative capitalism and left politics. Duke University Press, London
Epstein G (2017) Mass entertainment in the digital age is still about blockbusters, not endless choice. The Economist. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2017/02/11/mass-entertainment-in-the-digital-age-isstill-about-blockbusters-not-endless-choice. Accessed July (2019)
Freeland C (2012) Plutocrats:the rise of the new global super-rich and the fall of everyone else. Penguin Press, London
Fuchs C (2014a) Social media: a critical introduction. Sage, London
Fuchs C (2014b) Social media and the public sphere. TripleC 12(1):57–101. https://doi.org/10.31269/vol12iss1pp57-101
Garnham N (1992) The media and the public sphere. Habermas and the public sphere. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 359–376
Hall S (1996) The problem of ideology: marxism without guarantees. In: Morley D, Chen K-H (eds) Critical dialogues in cultural studies. Routledge, London, pp 24–45
Harlow S (2013) It was a “Facebook revolution”: Exploring the meme-like spread of narratives during the Egyptian protests. In: Revista de Comunicación, pp 59–82
Horkheimer M, Adorno TW, Cumming J (1972) The culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception. Book of dialectic of enlightenment. Herder and Herder, New York
Jameson F (1991) Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press, Durham
Kirkpatrick D (2010) The Facebook effect: the inside story of the company that is connecting the world. Simon & Shuster Paperbacks, New York
Lash S (2002) Critique of information. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks
Lunden I (2019) Bad news: Facebook leads in news consumption among social feeds, but most don’t trust it, says Pew. Techcrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/02/bad-news-social-media/. Accessed January (2020)
Matsakis L (2018) Facebook notification spam has crossed the line. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-notification-spam-two-factor/. Accessed September (2019)
Mayer J (2018) How Russia helped swing the election for trump. New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump. Accessed January (2020)
McLuhan M (1964) Understanding media. Routledge, London
Michels R (1915) Political parties: a sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy. The Free Press, New York
Михед О (2016) Бачити, щоб бути побаченим: реаліті-шоу, реаліті-роман та революція онлайн. ArtHuss, Kyiv
Naim M (2013) The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be. Basic Books, pp 306
Negroponte N (1995) Being digital. Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Kyiv: ArtHuss (2016) Бачити, щоб бути побаченим: реаліті-шоу, реаліті-роман та революція онлайн.
Orwell G (1977) 1984. Signet classics. ISBN 0-451-52493-4
Pariser E (2011) The filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. Penguin, London
Poster M (1998) Cyber democracy: the internet and the public sphere. In: Holmes D (ed) Virtual politics: identity and community in cyberspace. Sage, London, pp 212–228
Rose-Stockwell T (2017) This is how your fear and outrage are being sold for profit. Quartz. https://qz.com/1039910/how-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-sells-our-fear-and-outrage-for-profit/. Accessed May (2020)
Schmitt C (2007) The concept of the political. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (Expanded Edition [1932])
Sennet R (1977) The fall of public man. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (First published 1974)
Shirky C (2006) Powerlaws, weblogs, and inequality. In: Dean J, Anderson JW, Lovink G (eds) Reformatting politics. Information technology and global civil society. Routledge, London
Silverman C, Mac R, Dixit P (2020) “I Have Blood on My Hands”: a whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation. Buzz Feed. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo. Accessed June (2020)
Smythe D (1981) On the audience commodity and its work. Dependency road: communications, capitalism, consciousness and Canada. Ablex Publishing Corp, Norwood, pp 22–51
Susen (2011) Critical notes on Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. Sociol Anal 5(1), pp. 37–62. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2043824
Tocqueville A (2000) Democracy in America. University of Chicago Press, Chicago (First published 1835)
Williamson J (2002) Decoding advertisements. Ideology and meaning in advertising. Marion Boyars, London, pp 15–39 (First edition, 1976)
Zhao J (2014) New media and democracy: 3 competing visions from cyber-optimism and cyber-pessimism. J Pol Sci Public Aff. https://doi.org/10.4172/2332-0761.1000114
Žižek S (1994) The spectre of ideology. Mapping ideology. Verso, London, pp 1–33
Zuboff S (2019) The age of surveillance capitalism. The fight for the future at the new frontier of power. Public Affairs, New York
Zuckerberg M (2017) Bringing the world closer together. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/bringing-the-world-closer-together/10154944663901634/. Accessed August (2019)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hrudka, O. ‘Pretending to favour the public’: how Facebook’s declared democratising ideals are reversed by its practices. AI & Soc 38, 2105–2115 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01106-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-020-01106-8