Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere

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What is the impact of an increasingly digital public sphere on the health of our democracy and politics?  

Fake news, filter bubbles, polarisation and predatory private monopolies - if the internet was once hailed as the shining hope of free speech and democracy, it’s fair to say the bloom is now fully off the digital rose. 

And yet movements such as #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and the mobilising of mass protests in Hong Kong, Chile and Lebanon, show that digital information and communication technologies retain the potential to wield a powerful democratic force.  

Archon Fung is one of the world’s leading authorities on deliberative democracy. In a special event at the RSA, he looks at what it would take to restore democratic health to our digital public sphere. What are the rights, opportunities, freedoms and norms that must be established and upheld if digital technologies are to enhance democracy, rather than undermine it? And where does the responsibility for creating and maintaining such standards lie - with governments, the big tech platform companies, or ultimately with each one of us, as individual citizens? 

In partnership with the  Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster