Algorithmic Governance of the Public Sphere

Media companies have always curated the public sphere of the political community where they operate. They shape the information environment in which the community deliberates about collective action—deciding what is included and excluded, what is amplified and reduced. But in the age of mass participation in social media, curation is not just about selecting content, it is about governing the social relations from which that content emerges—shaping not only what we may learn or see, but how we relate to one another as members of a political community. Increasingly, this governance is algorithmic: recommender systems determine what speech to amplify, what to reduce, and (often with some human oversight) what to remove. The social impacts of algorithmic governance of the public sphere are highly contested; the paramount importance of using these tools more effectively to realise our social and political ideals surely less so. This keynote panel brings together scholars from communication studies, philosophy, law and computer science to better understand the nature of algorithmic governance of online speech, and to propose regulatory and technological paths forward.

This keynote panel at FAccT, chaired and curated by Seth Lazar, featured insights from Meredith Clark, Tarleton Gillespie, Daphne Keller, and Jon Kleinberg. View it again here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgT5zVsYdDs