Lecture II: Communicative Justice and the Distribution of Attention
It tackles the problem of how to govern communication and attention distribution in the digital public sphere for society, offering a novel theoretical framework rather than incremental improvements.
The paper addresses the lack of guidance in political philosophy for intentionally shaping the digital public sphere, which is governed by algorithmic intermediaries, and proposes a democratic egalitarian theory of communicative justice to address this gap.
Algorithmic intermediaries govern the digital public sphere through their architectures, amplification algorithms, and moderation practices. In doing so, they shape public communication and distribute attention in ways that were previously infeasible with such subtlety, speed and scale. From misinformation and affective polarisation to hate speech and radicalisation, the many pathologies of the digital public sphere attest that they could do so better. But what ideals should they aim at? Political philosophy should be able to help, but existing theories typically assume that a healthy public sphere will spontaneously emerge if only we get the boundaries of free expression right. They offer little guidance on how to intentionally constitute the digital public sphere. In addition to these theories focused on expression, we need a further theory of communicative justice, targeted specifically at the algorithmic intermediaries that shape communication and distribute attention. This lecture argues that political philosophy urgently owes an account of how to govern communication in the digital public sphere, and introduces and defends a democratic egalitarian theory of communicative justice.