Monitoring the Online Public    
Sphere

The enthusiasm about social media as agents of political change has significantly cooled off since the very same media are also used to distribute decapitations and radical propaganda. In France, the UK and in the Netherlands bill are proposed to assign vast powers to police forces and internet service providers to remove controversial content from social media. Prior to these proposals, these media channels already have been subject to content moderation, extensive monitoring and data analysis. The very same means that are used for market research are here used for law enforcement. Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube are the best monitored communication channels on the web.

Now, they constitute radical shifts in our society's approach to freedom of expression and formation of opinion. The corporate control dispositives that were supposed to keep platforms uncontroversial advertiser-friendly are now extended to security services to keep radical opinions out of sight and out of mind. While this approach is as ineffective as it is dangerous to core democratic values, it also signifies a fundamental transformation of our public sphere. The 'datafication' of everyday-chatter, water cooler conversations and backyard talk that flows through social media constitutes a public sphere of the profane and banal, searchable, retrievable and analysable. The indiscriminate retention of the emotional and imprudent next to informed reasoning and political discussion is creating a public sphere profoundly different from Habermas' organs of information and political debate.

This paper describes how the emergence of platforms dedicated to targeted advertising were expanding the public sphere and how its market research features constitute a security apparatus that in a surprisingly unquestioned way is affecting the traditional civic activities of political debate.