Social Media, Democracy, and the Popular Public Sphere

In April 2022, Barack Obama was invited by Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center to deliver a keynote address on the “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm.” The former US president made the trip to the “heart of the Silicon Valley,” as he put it, to issue a stern warning: social media are “one of the biggest reasons for democracies weakening” (Obama 2022). Coming from someone widely recognized to have employed digital technology to great effect in his presidential campaigns (Cogburn and Espinoza-Vasquez 2011; Harfoush 2009), this statement echoes a broader disenchantment with the Internet's democratic promises. Gone are the days when the Web was seen as a panacea to democratic deficit. Only a decade ago, social and political theorists predicted that new, networked, communicative processes would improve collective decision-making, challenge the top-down logic of mass media, and provide activists with means to resist excessive state authority (Castells 2013; Shirky 2009). Today, social media are most often associated with misinformation, the rise of populism, polarization, and democratic decay (Bimber and Gil de Zúñiga 2020; Boulianne et al. 2020; McKay and Tenove 2021; Sunstein 2018). Underlying these debates is the question of digital technology's impact on politics. Like newspapers two centuries ago or broadcast media in the past century,1 social media have altered the functioning of representative democracies in manifold ways. At the empirical level, extensive research has explored whether they favor the creation of “echo chambers” (Barberá 2020; Dubois and Blank 2018; Garrett 2009), whether they amplify radical content (Halpern and Gibbs 2013; Huszár et al. 2021), or whether increased social media use induces polarization (Bail 2021; Boxell et al. 2017; Dubois and Blank 2018; Yardi and Boyd 2010). For their part, political theorists have overwhelmingly attempted to make sense of the impact of digital technology on democracy with reference to Jürgen Habermas's work on the public sphere (Chambers and Gastil 2021; Dahlgren 2005; Dean 2003; Dommett and Verovšek 2021; Fuchs 2014; McKay and Tenove 2021; Sevignani 2022). This should not come as a surprise since Habermas was the first to comprehensively theorize the importance of the public sphere to democracy and dedicated considerable attention to the constitutive role of media in structuring it (Habermas 2015). However, the substantial evolution of his theories over four decades and his later contributions to the deliberative tradition of democratic thought have also muddied the waters and led many theorists to conflate the public sphere with deliberative democracy. The tendency has as a result been to measure—even if sometimes only implicitly—social media practices against deliberative norms (Chambers and Gastil 2021; Dahlgren 2001; Dean 2003; Papacharissi 2002; Rosa 2022), foreclosing the possibilities generated by the more open use of the concept of the public sphere that had been prevalent in political theory until the turn of the 21st century. I argue in this article that recovering such definition sheds new light on social media's impact on the public sphere by pointing to the role of digital technology in altering the balance of power between the liberal, bourgeois public sphere portrayed in Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and its oppositional nemesis, called “plebeian” by Habermas in the work's preface (Habermas 2015, xviii) or “proletarian” by some of his German critics such as Alexandre Kluge and Oskar Negt (Negt and Kluge 2016). Drawing on their insights but justifying a conscious departure from their terminology, I submit that we might have good reason to see social media as having bolstered the “popular public sphere,” at once deeply enmeshed in consumerist logics but also the bearer of an emancipatory promise that remains unfulfilled in the current media environment. My aims in doing such work are twofold. 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