Introduction: Regulating the Public Sphere in a Post‐Truth World
Introduction: Regulating the Public Sphere in a
Post‐Truth
World
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简介：后真相世界中的公共领域监管
DOI：
10.1111/1467-923x.13030
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发表时间：
2021
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
D. Yarrow
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Fay Niker;D. Yarrow
今年是英国脱欧公投和唐纳德·特朗普当选美国总统五周年，这些政治事件暴露了当今民主政治本质的深刻问题，动摇了许多人对“一切照旧”的信心。 2016 年政治事件凸显的许多最令人担忧的问题都与民主公民的认知基础有关。苏珊·斯特宾 (Susan Stebbing) 在 1939 年写道，当时正值另一个政治困境和两极分化的时刻，“今天，民主国家的公民迫切需要好好思考。”仅仅拥有新闻自由和议会机构是不够的。”1 这些话似乎再一次贴切了。最近从认知科学到政治理论等领域的争论有助于我们理解个人的能力和“良好思考”的失败。显然，要培养、维持和良好地运用任何此类能力，个人需要成为认知上健康的公共领域的一部分，或者至少不属于不健康的公共领域。然而，正是对公共领域健康状况恶化的担忧才是我们当前困境的核心。其中包括： 对“假新闻”和错误信息传播的担忧；对专业知识的信任消失以及“另类事实”和阴谋论的发展；以及“回音室”和“过滤气泡”在阻碍与具有不同生活经历或世界观的其他人进行真正对话方面的作用。虽然这些问题在 2016 年的政治动乱中首次成为人们关注的焦点，但自那以后的几年里，这些问题只会愈演愈烈。例如，剑桥分析丑闻及其更广泛的影响引发了关于社交媒体公司（SMC）在政治生活中适当角色的争论。例如，SMC 是出版商还是仅仅是平台？ SMC 应该在多大程度上负责调节其服务器上发生的政治辩论和信息传播？同样，2020 年美国总统大选的特点是特朗普竞选团队在选举前后系统性地发布错误信息，旨在使选举进程失去合法性并阻止权力的和平移交。这在 2021 年 1 月 6 日冲击美国国会大厦时达到顶峰。SMC 对这些戏剧性事态发展的反应，首先是标记特朗普竞选活动的内容，后来临时永久禁止特朗普使用许多知名平台，引发的问题与解答的问题一样多。作为回应，很多注意力都集中在我们如何调节我们的认知环境以治愈或至少减轻其中一些弊病。人们普遍认为，跨越党派政治分歧的政治辩论所处的空间存在新的问题。过去五年出现了一系列旨在规范政治信息流通和参与的举措，从而重建一个更健康、更知情、宽容、包容的公共领域。其中许多都是 SMC 的自我监管行为，例如 Facebook 的“第三方事实核查计划”和 Twitter 的“公民诚信”以及“合成和操纵媒体”政策。 2 无论其各自的优点如何，这些监管反应通常都是被动且零散的。现在很明显，任务不仅仅是修复公共领域的暂时断裂，而是应对其质的和永久性的转变——
THIS YEAR marks the fifth anniversary of both the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as US President-political events that shook many people's confidence in ‘business as usual’by exposing deep problems with the nature of democratic politics today. Many of the most alarming problems highlighted by the political events of 2016 concern the epistemic bases of democratic citizenship. Susan Stebbing wrote in 1939, during another moment of political predicament and polarisation, that ‘[t] here is an urgent need today for the citizens of a democracy to think well. It is not enough to have freedom of the press and parliamentary institutions.’1 These words seem apt once again. Recent debates in areas ranging from the cognitive sciences to political theory have contributed to our understanding of individuals’ abilities and failures to ‘think well’. Clearly, for any such abilities to be cultivated, maintained and exercised well, individuals need to be part of an epistemically healthy public sphere-or at least not part of an unhealthy one. Yet, it is precisely worries about the declining health of the public sphere that are at the heart of our present predicament. These include: concerns over ‘fake news’ and the spread of misinformation; erasure of trust in expertise and the advance of ‘alternative facts’ and conspiracy theories; and the role of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ in blocking genuine dialogue with others who have different life experiences or worldviews. While these issues first came into sharp focus with the political convulsions of 2016, they have only intensified in the years since. The Cambridge Analytica scandal and its wider fallout, for example, has concentrated debate about the proper role of social media companies (SMCs) in political life. For instance, are SMCs publishers or merely platforms? And to what extent should SMCs be held responsible for moderating the political debates and spread of information that take place on their servers?Likewise, the 2020 US presidential election was characterised by systematic misinformation by the Trump campaign, both before and after the election, aimed at delegitimising the electoral process and preventing the peaceful transfer of power. This culminated in the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The response of SMCs to these dramatic developments, firstly with the flagging of content from the Trump campaign and later the ad hoc permanent banning of Trump from many prominent platforms, raised as many questions as it answered. In response, much attention has been directed toward how we might regulate our epistemic environments in order to cure, or at least alleviate, some of these ills. There is a widespread sense, crossingpartypoliticaldivides, thattherearenovel problems with the spaces in which our political debate is situated. The past five years have seen a flurry of initiatives aimed at regulating the circulation of and engagement with political information, and thus reconstructing a healthiermoreinformed, tolerant, inclusive-publicsphere. Manyofthesehavebeenself-regulatoryactionsby SMCs, such as Facebook's ‘third-party factchecking program’and Twitter's ‘civic integrity’and ‘synthetic and manipulated media’policies. 2 Whatever their individual merits, these regulatory responses have generally been reactive and piecemeal. It is now clear that the task is not simply to repair a temporary rupture in the public sphere, but rather to respond to its qualitative and permanent transformation-