About

Professor Archon Fung is associated with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard. His work focuses on developing ideas and fostering practices for equal and inclusive, multiracial, and multiethnic democracy and self-government. His research addresses pressing issues facing democracy and democratic institutions around the world, including expanding voting access and developing strategies for antiracist organizational change. He is involved in exploring the role of artificial intelligence in ethical decision-making, examining how AI systems respond to moral dilemmas and the implications for transparency and human oversight. Through his contributions, he aims to reimagine democracy by emphasizing citizen power and societal resilience, engaging with global practices for shared futures.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Public relations
• Business
• Sociology
• Law
• Environmental health
• Economics
• Biology
• Socioeconomics
• Medicine
• Economic growth
• Marketing
• Genetics
• Public administration
• Nursing

Selected publications

• Varieties of Participation in Complex Governance

  2026-01-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The multifaceted challenges of contemporary governance demand a complex account of the ways in which those who are subject to laws and policies should participate in making them. This article develops a framework for understanding the range of institutional possibilities for public participation. Mechanisms of participation vary along three important dimensions: who participates, how participants communicate with one another and make decisions together, and how discussions are linked with policy or public action. These three dimensions constitute a space in which any particular mechanism of participation can be located. Different regions of this institutional design space are more and less suited to addressing important problems of democratic governance such as legitimacy, justice, and effective administration.

  PublisherDOI

• Artificial Intelligence and Democracy: Campaigns, Elections, Movements, and Deliberation

  2026-05-06

  article

  This chapter examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming four domains of democratic practice: political campaigns, election administration, social movements, and citizen deliberation. Using a task-based framework from labor economics, we analyze which political functions AI can substitute for, leave unchanged, or augment. In campaigns, AI accelerates content production and demonstrates persuasive capabilities exceeding traditional methods. In election administration, adoption remains limited, with AI’s tendency toward hallucination restricting its use to back-office tasks. For social movements, AI enables mobilization tools in hostile environments. In citizen deliberation, pioneering applications – Taiwan’s vTaiwan and Google DeepMind’s Habermas Machine – use AI to facilitate large-scale deliberation. We identify tensions between AI’s capacity to expand participation and the risks of centralizing control among platforms and well-resourced actors. We emphasize that AI’s democratic impact depends upon organizational integration of these technologies, competitive dynamics, regulation, and political leadership rather than technological capabilities alone.

  PublisherDOI

• What are conflicts of interest and what can be done about them?

  2025-02-28

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Exploring Democratic Deliberation in Public Health: Bridging Division and Enhancing Community Engagement

  American Journal of Public Health · 2025-03-12 · 4 citations

  editorialOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The All-Affected Principle

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-14

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Many theories of democracy presume that democratic authority governs a fixed set of people -citizens -who reside in a fixed territory, usually a sovereign state.The authors of this volume explore a different starting point for democracy: the All-Affected Principle (AAP). 3 That principle states that everyone who is affected by a decision should be able to influence that decision.According to the AAP, everyone in the world -not just the citizens of Texas or the United States -should have a say over T. R. McHooligan's geo-engineering project because his decisions affect everyone in the world.Turning to actual events rather than speculative fiction, politics in the streets and in parliaments over the last decade evince widespread disappointment and anger at the reality of the territorially organized liberal democracies that reigned hegemonic at the beginning of the twenty-first century.The Indignados in Spain and #Occupy movements in major cities like New York, London, Paris, and Toronto highlighted the failure of liberal democracies to advance distributive justice after the Great Recession of 2007-2009.Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise, and other movements press societies to face up to the existential threat of climate change.Populist leaders and movements -marked by the victories of Brexit in the United Kingdom and then of Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential contest -rode waves of disaffection with liberal democracy.In the COVID-19 pandemic, this disaffection transmogrified into the dysfunctions that come from institutional distrust and illegitimacy, leading to violent conflicts about social distancing and massive vaccine skepticism in many parts of the world.Perhaps these challenges to the existing political order in the democratic precincts of the world need not trigger deeper normative reconsideration.It may be that this turbulence is a failure of politics, not of democratic theory.Perhaps we should strive more vigorously in light of these failures to achieve what many normative political views already recommend: liberal democracies of free and equal citizens governing themselves through the powers of territorially bounded nation-states that hierarchically rule over not just the citizens, but the corporations and civic organizations, in those territories (see Macdonald, this volume).The authors of this volume take a different path.We explore a whether the very different normative starting point of the AAP can provide a useful guide to assessing our practices of governance, designing institutions, and justifying democracy.As Melissa Lane (Chapter 12) describes, the AAP has ancient origins in Western thought, tracing back to the Codex of Justinian in the fifth century: "quod omnes similiter tangit, ab omnibus comprobetur" ("What touches all similarly must be approved by all").Many attribute contemporary usage of the principle to Robert Dahl.Dahl offered this formulation:Everyone who is affected by the decisions of a government should have the right to participate in that government. 4

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• Issue Information

  Philosophy &amp Public Affairs · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  paratextOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Arrest student protesters, wait or negotiate? Colleges can use ‘ladder of harm’ to determine appropriate response to Gaza protests on campus

  2024-07-24

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Conflict of interest in government: Avoiding ethical and conceptual mistakes

  Governance · 2024-06-03 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Conflict of interest is among the most regulated forms of official behavior. In the United States, the vast bureaucracy of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) is almost entirely devoted to controlling conflicts of interest. Ethics rules for state agencies and state legislatures are ubiquitous. But this profusion of effort has failed to solve the problem. According to one comprehensive survey, conflict of interest regulations in European countries abound, but “the landscape is highly fragmented [among] various ethics commissions, ethics inspectorates, ethics commissioners, integrity officers… No EU- and national administration is equipped with the necessary resources, skills, and tools to monitor COI in an efficient and effective way” (European Parliament, 2020, pp. 8–9). Surveys show that conflict of interest is a major concern of citizens. There may well be more conflicts of interest now than several decades ago (Cox & Thomas, 2018; Shepherd & You, 2019; Wike et al., 2021). Conflict of interest is among the least well understood of dilemmas of public office. By exposing errors about conflicts of interest, we hope to enable officials to confront these conflicts more honestly, citizens to judge official conflicts of interest more fairly, and regulators to do their job more competently. Conflicts of interest compromise not just integrity and competence but democracy itself. Democratic processes importantly determine the public interest. Democracy requires officials to exercise their judgment to advance that public interest (Boot, 2022). Officials who are not motivated to act in the public interest thus threaten democratic governance. Contrary motivations arise because officials also have their own interests, often coming from their private lives, that may not be compatible with public interests. The juxtaposition of these two kinds of interests—a primary public interest dictated by their official role and a secondary interest influenced by private life—create the tension that is known as conflict of interest. A conflict of interest is thus best understood as a set of circumstances that is reasonably believed to create a substantial risk that an official's judgment of a primary, public, interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest which typically though not exclusively involves financial gain (Thompson, 1993 see also chapter 2 of Institute of Medicine, 2009). A conflict of interest thus increases the risk of corruption. We have learned from common experience that secondary private interests can taint official's judgment about how best to advance the public interest. Comparative scholars note that while attention in the US has focused on the danger of private sector interests, in the parliamentary and Westminster systems, the burdens on MPs independent judgments often come from the party itself, for instance from a Prime Minister who controls the salaries and opportunities of many MPs (Stark, 2008, p. 129). When secondary interests—be they from public or private sources—dominate, an official acts corruptly. Conflict of interest rules are intended to protect against this risk of corruption. Conflict of interest regulation also aims to maintain public confidence in public officials. Efforts to regulate, however, can go wrong in two different ways. They can underestimate the risk by missing cases that should be regulated. Or they can overestimate the risk by counting cases as conflicts that should not be problematic (typically by discounting the harms of prohibition). I can tell you, sitting shoulder to shoulder with him through these interviews, watching him talk to world leaders on the phone, one after another… the president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, is completely focused on the people’s business… And I promise you, and I can assure the public that they’ll have the proper separation from their business enterprise. (Rozsa, 2016) The honesty claim is an appeal to character. The risk that an official will subordinate pursuit of his or her primary interest because of a corrupting secondary interest is low because that official is honest and so “completely focused on the people's business.” The honesty claim also figured prominently in the debate about whether Justice Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from cases related to the 2020 Presidential Election. His wife “Ginny” Thomas—a long-time conservative activist—actively supported President Trump's efforts to overturn the electoral counts submitted by several states. Several days after the election, Mrs. Thomas texted President Trump's Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History” (Barnes & Marimow, 2022). Ginny Thomas defended against this charge of conflict (Totenberg, 2022) by denying that any influence could occur because she and her husband do not discuss Supreme Court cases “until [the court's] opinion are public—and even then, our discussions have always been… limited to public information.” Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) also invoked the honesty claim in defense: “Justice Thomas is a great American and an outstanding Justice… I have total confidence in his brilliance and impartiality in every aspect of the work of the Court” (Barnes & Marimow, 2022). But critics argued that Justice Thomas's primary interest in correctly deciding questions of constitutional law might be reasonably believed to be influenced by his secondary interest in protecting his wife. “The more we learn about her activities, the even clearer it becomes that [Justice] Thomas cannot sit in any case concerning the election or the ‘Stop the Steal’ effort or the insurrection,” said New York University judicial ethics expert Stephen Gillers. The conflict led some legislators to call for Justice Thomas's resignation. Rep. Betty McCollum (McCollum, 2022) issued a statement to that effect, which read in part: “Rather than disclose this conflict of interest and recuse himself from cases related to his wife's involvement in the Big Lie, Justice Thomas took part in court rulings and voted to prevent the disclosure of White House communication logs.” While it is of course desirable for officials to be honest, the honesty defense fails to respond to conflict of interest concerns. First, even people of honest character can deceive themselves about what exactly the public interest requires, especially when personal gain hangs in the balance. A European Parliament report put it this way: “Often, Ministers and top-officials esteem too highly their ability to deal with their own CoI. They also overestimate their capacity to deal in a conscious and impartial way with their own CoI” (European Parliament, 2020, p. 36). Second, even if the official does exercise her best judgment, citizens who rely on that official may reasonably suspect that strong secondary interests affected the official's decision. Third, testimony from people who know an official well does not help citizens who cannot sit “shoulder to shoulder” with him. The motive denial is a second common mistaken rebuttal to conflict of interest accusations. Whereas the honesty mistake relies on enduring character, the motive denial highlights the reasons that ground specific decisions: “Yes, I had conflicting interests, but I made the decision for public interest reasons and not for my (conflicting) secondary interests.” Consider Hillary Clinton's conflicts when she served as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration. In that role, her primary interest was to serve the American people by advancing the foreign policy interests of the United States. Her secondary interests included accumulating private resources, perhaps preparing for what would be her 2016 Presidential campaign, and expanding the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. These secondary interests may have influenced her decisions at least about how to use her time. An Associated Press (2016) investigation found that Secretary Clinton had some 153 meetings or calls with private organizations and leaders and 85 of them had either committed or pledged money to Clinton Foundation programs. The Clinton Foundation also received millions from foreign governments while Clinton served a public official (Helderman & Hamburger, 2015). Secretary Clinton responded to these charges of conflict of interest with two defenses based on the propriety of her motives (Meckler, 2016). On CNN's Anderson Cooper show, she responded broadly that “My work as Secretary of State was not influenced by any outside forces… I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right, to keep Americans safe and protect U.S. interests abroad.” She offered a more specific motive denial with respect to the Clinton Foundation and its programs. She said that it is “absurd” to charge that taking those meetings was motivated by “connections with the foundation instead of their status as highly respected global leaders.” As with the honesty mistake, officials may deceive themselves about their motives. But the motive denial asks even more of the public than the honesty defense. Most citizens are not in a position to discern what motivates an official. They can see only the circumstances in which officials make decisions and must decide on that basis. Many Americans were skeptical of Secretary Clinton's motive denial. In a 2015 CBS news poll, 53% of respondents said that foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation constituted a conflict of interest, while only 37% said that they weren't relevant (CBS News, 2015). A third common mistake is to think that coincidence between a political leader's primary and secondary interests resolves a conflict of interest. Getman and Karlan (2008) articulate one basis for this error: “the best representative is one who is typical of her constituents, because the more her interests converge with those of the electorate, the less danger there is of principal-agent divergence.” In 1953, President Eisenhower nominated long-serving General Motors executive Charles Wilson to be his Secretary of Defense. Wilson declined to divest his stock holdings in General Motors which was a major supplier to the military. When asked by Senator Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey about this conflict, Wilson reportedly replied that the interests of GM and the US are aligned, “for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country… (Strohl, 2019)” Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia offers a more recent example of the constituent interest rationale. According to Flavelle et al. (2022), “the bulk of Mr. Manchin's reported income since entering the Senate has come from one company: Enersystems, Inc.” When asked about this conflict arising from his ownership and benefits from coal concerns, Manchin claimed convergence between his secondary interests and the public interest: “I did it to keep West Virginia people working.” Democratic Party politician Jerry Brown, having campaigned on a platform to benefit under-developed parts of Oakland, served as its Mayor from 1999 to 2007. One of his top priorities was to bring development to downtown Oakland. However, he also personally owned property that was located some 500 feet from a redevelopment project. Brown also claimed congruence between his secondary interests and the public interest: “Brown had touted his personal stake in downtown Oakland as the reason he would be an effective champion for revitalization” (Getman & Karlan, 2008).2 In the three cases of Wilson, Manchin, and Brown, secondary interests coincide with constituent interests to some degree. From a pluralist conception, that coincidence does relieve some concerns that secondary interests will unduly distort officials' judgments about what is best for the public. But because the range of secondary interests of an official is never fully aligned with the interests of her constituents, conflicts of interest still impose worrisome burdens on official judgment. Members of their constituencies have a range of other interests that Wilson, Manchin, and Brown may not share. Consumers may suffer higher prices caused by efforts to benefit General Motors. Some West Virginians benefit from the strength of the United Mine Workers in ways that Manchin may not. And rents for some Oakland residents may be driven up by downtown development. A pluralist might respond that though no single official can mirror the full range of social interests, the political system overall should reflect them. This rationale creates very demanding requirements for excusing conflicts of interest. Charlie Wilson's secondary interests in General Motors (or Manchin's or Brown's secondary interests) would be excused only if there were also in the political system other officials who had secondary interests that with those of the and many other interests. In with substantial this demanding is to be because officials' financial secondary interests often from to people and The constituent interest appeal can also be at its by the pluralist that the public interest from constituent interests. about to more than the of constituent interests. In how best to advance the public interest, officials might to protect or who are A common mistake is to rely too or even to conflicts of interest. the and constituent interest those who advance the disclosure that conflicts of interest create substantial concerns, but they that public disclosure will those concerns. As is the best First, citizens to officials by demanding or other Second, citizens are to themselves if they know about officials' Third, disclosure requirements may officials from having conflicts of interest. While disclosure can be a it will often be be disclosure must a of that official et al., must be by those who or political They in must be to for by public officials would have to respond to this in ways as or But in this may may be but electoral may officials from and officials may respond by than As officials from to the private they bring with them and experience that may benefit the public interest as well as their secondary interest. This is the However, also conflict of interest concerns. A recent European Parliament report as “the greatest of in part because many countries have that between the public and private (European Parliament, p. of private sector may regulators to who might them. This can to an In of efforts to the and of the According to a with the official in charge of not only in a but in the that believed to the of the with a of that he did not about and did it if we at his the a conflict between his secondary interest in and his primary interest as an official because may have his judgment about how best to use to protect public interests. Many regulators in the and come from executive in financial through the from private to may to in which world that private in to regulation may come to think that regulations are and can a against regulation when those people public In to these officials to the from officials and that they bring with them private sector On the other of the coming from the private sector may have that enable them to more et al., & 2016). But there are reasons the defense is to a to concerns. Conflict of interest does not a to if a low of it could be the case that of conflicts of interest in which there is risk of public judgment. the and are not A might on regulated in the hope of and her to after While most about conflicts of interest its that the for regulation are also (Stark, First, they can have the of regulation and against concerns about conflict of interest. Second, conflicts of interest may to rules that from entering public Third, these may to that public officials should (Thompson, 2009). regulation can a to the of with what should be as conflicts of interest abound, even public officials should be to some secondary interests. an in the executive was from on policy because she on her own just other Americans and of with 2021). In to 2022) that would ownership and of by of of the House made exactly this are a should be to in 2021). She that and is a that should be But a she her “I do in the integrity of people in public I the public to have that have to do this to that we see as a problem. is a confidence & 2022). I is to the of in But is also to that and calls is It may be to respect for only in that to benefit from in which a could be to put their holdings in a should to substantial conflicts completely from the of While the and of may them to a very the almost people who have highly and According to U.S. of them are from in decisions and in which they have financial interests they or A investigation by the found that some of those from to to to and even in that their agencies et al., 2022). the many millions of Americans holdings for their financial The common of financial many officials in a not of interest. The and that of the do not these conflicts they to between the of for financial and against the public interest in having officials who exercise their best judgments to advance the public interest. conflict of interest regulations for for a on an may up to in a single and up to in for in a This policy some financial on the part of the while protecting the public interest by that these could be to interests in This the public interest because it is to know how decisions will the of and it the of by them to in some The of conflict of interest regulation may be even more common in In the was to about a for those who to with the and a 2022). An to the that three of the were because their as The State Ethics that these three should had for so only one of the to The in to be a would have to of to have a on 2022). In cases conflict of interest regulation has too the of officials. The secondary interest in this case was and the conflict could have with by other by an independent to make a conflicts are circumstances in which there is an conflict of interest, but in which the private interest is so that it on an official's judgment. regulations that conflicts of interest officials from the public interest. a from from more than in a single instance or more than in a any from the or that could be affected by 2009). This from is at more than at many and other The creates in which officials money of their personal in to when and other not do to the would to of Many conflict of interest not just conflicts of interest, but even their the between and the private sector that “The is to any conflict of interest or even the of a conflict of interest in The charge of a conflict of interest is often with the & [the of stock just about but about the of stock by and their would we are to two at concerns about conflict of But we are also a of in our in the United of that of is a to our as we have the It is our to that we that of because it is these that can be to our most 2022) that conflicts are conflicts about but go of The is that we a and because we are with Efforts to even the of conflict of interest are mistaken in at least two ways. First, this use of the the is because conflict of interest an A conflict is by a set of circumstances that would reasonably to risk the is part of the of conflict of interest. Second, if and conflict are as from conflict, many more circumstances are to be to Conflict of interest regulation its proper Consider a An official in charge of an about by a and with and The official relevant and public The company does not have to or in and is not in other that the official of a might that any creates the of a But this would be a case of because there is no the official does not have to make judgments that benefit the or that has only the not the of conflict to those who in we argued that public disclosure of is no some disclosure is But it is a mistake to think that more public disclosure is always or that officials should disclose about their secondary interests. In for some some are to financial income for for for several for 2021). some must disclose of of their outside the United States. rules about secondary interests that are often to the primary interest of the or if they are the conflicts they create are disclosure has to disclose about that only to be conflicts of interest, can the of especially when it can people from public with disclosure requirements can be and who are not of can about conflicts of interest in the of We hope that a clearer of the we have to those are for and conflict of interest Ethics and in of not only and conflicts of interest, but they must also in to the and those to those who must We also hope that our will help officials who are at risk of conflicts to the more when the risk is and when it is It may be that of and officials to the mistaken and constituent interest when their own conflicts of interest. a clearer of the about conflict of interests should help and other of the public judge the and of public officials. these is because conflict of interest is for By of their and officials in which their public primary interests) often with their private secondary these officials have a to act in the public interest. is with conflicts and many cannot be Conflict of interest is a that to be correctly and is more when officials and citizens the we have that they have no conflicting interests to we did not from any organizations to for this of and Government and for Democratic and of and of the for is not to this as no were or in this

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• Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere

  Constellations · 2023-03-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The Internet has democratized speech, creating a forum for public self-expression and connecting billions of speakers and listeners who never could have found each other before. The forum is not without faults, to be sure, but never before have so many people been afforded so many opportunities to speak, be heard, and share information with others. Just as printing made everyone a potential reader, today digitalisation is making everyone into a potential author. But how long did it take until everyone was able to read? . . . A politically appropriate perception of the author role, which is not the same as the consumer role, tends to increase the awareness of deficits in one's own level of knowledge. The author role also has to be learned; and as long as this has not been realised in the political exchange in social media, the quality of uninhibited discourse shielded from dissonant opinions and criticism will continue to suffer. Despite accumulating challenges, digital information and communication technologies retain considerable democratic potential. They have enabled movements, mass protests, and open-data initiatives in cities. But as we have all learned from the failures of an earlier wave of techno-utopianism, the democratic exploitation of technological affordances is deeply contingent—dependent on ethical conviction, political engagement, public regulation, and good design choices. In particular, and in the spirit of Habermas’ remark quoted at the outset, we think that the democratic potential will only be realized if participants in what we will be calling “the digital public sphere” deepen their sense of responsibility for how communication proceeds there. A brief clarification: by “the digital public sphere,” we mean a public sphere in which discussion about matters of potentially shared concern is shaped in part by communication on online platforms (intermediaries that store users’ information and enable its public dissemination). Thus, the digital public sphere is neither everything that happens online or on online platforms (much of which is not discussion of matters of shared concern), nor is it only online. It is a public sphere in which communication on platforms plays an important role in shaping public discussion. We will begin by sketching an idealized democratic public sphere, which marries inclusion and deliberation. Our current digitalized public sphere is dramatically more inclusive than the post-war mass media public sphere. But this expansion of inclusion has come at a substantial deliberative price. To improve the quality of public discussion, we focus on the responsibilities that participants must take on for the digital public sphere to be more democratically successful. To be sure, participant action is insufficient. We and others have offered suggestions for the contributions of regulation, corporate responsibility, and the contributions of researchers, as well as civic and advocacy organizations. The European Union's new regulations on Intermediary Services, for example, the Digital Services Act, include requirements on illegal content and impose due diligence responsibilities on very large online platforms that will need to do audited systematic risk assessments and offer plans for remediation (Husovec & Roche Laguna, 2022). This approach has much to be said for it (though with the proliferation of generative models, it may be addressed to last year's problems). But because the digital public sphere has vastly expanded the aperture for contributions to discussion, and because we are uneasy about regulating the substance of public discussion, we are skeptical about proposals to turn public regulators or platforms (or any other agents) into editorial guardians. Emphasizing participant responsibilities may give the appearance that we are at once blaming and burdening the victims of degraded public discussion. We resist that characterization. Instead, we focus here on the role of participants because they must become more capable and responsible if we are to retain the democratically attractive qualities of greater inclusion that the digital public sphere has brought. Relying solely on regulatory mechanisms, whether public or private, will create guardians over the practice of public communication. And such guardianship seems to give up on the democratic promise of self-government by consociates. We begin with the idea of a democratic society whose free and equal members use their common reason to argue about the substance of public issues and in which the exercise of power is guided by that use. The animating idea is to marry broad opportunities for participation by members with their engagement about the merits of different courses of public action: to combine an inclusive democracy with public reasoning. Thus understood, democratic politics—as a discursive exercise of political autonomy—depends on informal, open-ended, fluid, dispersed public discussions of matters of common concern. Rights: Each person has rights to basic liberties, including liberties of expression and association. The central meaning of expressive liberty is a strong presumption against viewpoint discrimination—against regulating speech for reasons having to do with its perspective. That presumption protects both the expressive interests of speakers and the deliberative interests of audiences and bystanders by enabling access to fundamentally different ideas. It also secures the independence of public discussion from authoritative regulation (Blasi, 2017). While the right to expressive liberty does protect individuals against censorship, it is also democracy enabling. Protecting speech from viewpoint regulation helps establish the conditions that enable equal citizens to form and express their views and monitor and hold accountable those who exercise power. And it gives participants additional reason for judging the results to be legitimate. Expression: Each person has good and equal chances to express views on issues of public concern to a public audience. While our Rights condition bars viewpoint-discriminatory restrictions on expressive liberty, Expression adds substance by requiring fair opportunities to participate in public discussion by communicating views on matters of common concern to audiences beyond friends and personal acquaintances. Expression requires a fair opportunity to reach an audience given reasonable efforts. Access: Each person has good and equal access to instructive information on matters of public concern. Access is not an entitlement to be informed because becoming informed requires a measure of effort. Instead, access requires that those who make reasonable efforts can acquire instructive information from reliable sources. Reliable sources are trustworthy and reasonable to trust, though of course not always accurate. Instructive information is relevant to the issues under discussion and understandable without specialized training. Diversity: Each person has good and equal chances to hear a wide range of views on issues of public concern. Diversity is not simply about the opportunity to acquire factual information. It is about reasonable access to a range of competing views about public values, and the implications of those views for matters of public concern. Access to information about tax incidence is important, for example, but so are chances to hear competing views about tax fairness. Diversity is valuable both because exposure to disagreement is important for understanding the meaning and justification of one's own views and because such exposure provides a good environment for forming reasonable and accurate beliefs. Diversity thus confers individual benefits and arguably contributes to the quality of public deliberation. Communicative Power: Each person has good and equal chances to associate and explore interests and ideas together with others with an eye to arriving at common understandings and advancing common concerns (Arendt, 1970; Habermas, 1998, chapter 4). Communicative Power is a capacity for sustained joint or collective action, generated through such open-ended discussion, exploration, and mutual understanding. The Communicative Power condition thus helps to give substance to the equal rights of association contained in the rights requirement. These conditions, which together describe a structure of equal, substantive communicative freedom, have far-reaching political, social, and economic implications. Equal standing in public reasoning requires favorable social background conditions, including limits on socioeconomic inequality and the dependencies associated with it. Similarly, the conjunction of rights and expression is in tension with concentrated private control of communicative opportunities. Truth: First, participants in a well-functioning public sphere understand and are disposed to acknowledge the importance of truth. That means not deliberately misrepresenting their beliefs or showing reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of their assertions. The norm prohibits negligence about the truth or falsity of their assertions when they know that others are relying on their representations, especially when the potential costs of that reliance may be large. Respecting a norm of truthfulness of course does not assure or require getting things right: anyone who understands the nature and importance of truth knows that they do not have it on most issues. But it demands an effort to get things right, with a recognition that it is often difficult to get things right even when everyone is aiming at the truth. Because uncertainty, error, and disagreement are normal features of public discussion, this norm requires a willingness to correct errors in assertion, particularly when others have relied on those assertions. Common Good: Second, participants are concerned about the common good, on some reasonable understanding of the common good. “Reasonable understandings” respect the equal standing and equal importance of people entitled to participate in public discussion. A well-functioning public sphere does not depend on a shared view of justice or the common good. But it does depend on participants who are concerned that their own views on fundamental political questions are guided by a reasonable conception of the common good. Here, the value of equality is expressed not only in the rights and opportunities that define the structure of communicative freedom but also in the conceptions of justice and the common good that participants bring to public discussion and that frame their contributions. Civility: Third, participants recognize the obligation to be prepared to justify views by reference to that conception. Thus, participants do not view political argument as simply affirming group membership and group identity, much less as a rhetorical strategy for exercising power in the service of personal or group advantage. We call this a matter of civility because we are not thinking of civility as a matter of politeness but of being prepared to explain to others why the laws and policies that we support can be supported by core, democratic values and principles—say, values of liberty, equality, and the general welfare—and being prepared to listen to others and be open to accommodating their reasonable views. These conditions are demanding. We lay them out explicitly in order to consider how the existence of a digitally mediated public sphere—in which platforms provide important informational and communicative infrastructure—bears on these conditions of a well-functioning democratic public sphere. As we have argued elsewhere, digitalization of the public sphere has had decidedly mixed effects. In democratic societies and perhaps even in some authoritarian contexts, social media has increased the communicative power of those who previously lacked access to the means of mass communication. We see this inclusion not just in Q-Anon and “Stop the Steal,” but also in the Movement for Black Lives and #MeToo. The opportunities for expression and encountering diverse content have mostly increased with the radical expansion of chances for authorship. But these opportunities for many have constricted because among social media's affordances include the ease of suppressing others’ views through trolling, doxxing, and other forms of attack. Access to reliable information has in some ways increased. But deception, misinformation, and propaganda accompany this informational abundance, and it is not easy to sort between them. Building a more democratic public sphere will require concerted action by, among others, governments, private companies, nongovernmental organizations, and citizens themselves. But in the remainder of this contribution, we focus on the responsibilities of individuals and groups who participate in the public sphere as authors, amplifiers, and readers because this aspect has received somewhat less attention. Indeed, many have been skeptical that individuals can rise to meet the challenges of public sphere digitalization or should even be asked or expected to do so. Individuals have democratic responsibilities as authors, readers, listeners, viewers, and joiners and participants in collective communicative action. By dramatically reducing the costs of transmitting messages, the digital public sphere has increased the aperture of information and communication. If we wish to avoid reducing opportunities for expression and imposing significant hurdles on access to information, the digital public sphere will impose greater burdens on individuals and groups to distinguish information from manipulation, exercise greater restraint in deciding what to communicate, and sanction others who abuse these norms. Platforms and governments can help to enable that active, affirmative role. Many of the democratic benefits of the mass media public sphere depended on journalists who embraced democratic norms and responsibilities (Hamilton, 2018). The organizations that employed them—as well as professional organizations—sometimes rewarded those democratic norms. Although the analogy of citizens and groups with professional journalists is very imperfect, internet companies should help users behave as citizens by designing their platforms to foster participants’ democratic orientation. They can also take responsibility for enhancing digital literacy by more explicitly recognizing that some sources are negligent about truth, by spreading habits of checking, and by encouraging users to encounter diverse perspectives. But design is not enough; we will also need bottom-up efforts that elicit the right kind of engagement and content generation from users. Focusing, then, on truth and the common good, what do these norms imply for communicative responsibilities? In both spheres of mass media and the digital public, the truth-seeking norm requires citizens (including in their role as authors) to be media literate in the sense that they can distinguish information from propaganda. The proliferation of sources and content makes that task more challenging and also more important. Aiding others’ opportunities for access to reliable information requires making some effort to check on the veracity of stories before liking or forwarding them and a disposition to resist amplifying messages that lack truth or undermine civility, even when that amplification is self-satisfying, in-group reinforcing, or profitable. Platforms can help by promoting content from reliable sources, offering tools that enable users to assess the veracity and trustworthiness of specific content and of their information diets in general, by rewarding—and enabling users to reward—truth-seeking behavior on their platforms and also by instructing users about the importance of epistemic humility. Teachers, as well as students of information and communication, could help by developing updated methods (such as attention to the quality of sources, cross-checking assertions, and awareness of confirmation bias) that enable citizens to better discern reliability and relevance in the digital environment. Alternatively, consider the commitment to the common good. Although citizens disagree about what justice requires or the ends that society ought to pursue, a commitment to the common good requires citizens to resolve these differences on a basis that respects the equal importance of others. Projecting this broad commitment into the digital public sphere, a common good orientation will often require citizens to avoid narrow news diets (Guess, 2021). It also requires citizens to be attentive to a broader array of information in order to be able to form views and make appropriate judgments. Doing that, in turn, requires learning about the interests, perspectives, and pain of others. A commitment to the common good thus requires citizens to inhabit parts of the digital public sphere that are common in the sense that they encounter information from diverse perspectives. Citizens should help create these common spaces by putting forth views and perspectives that appeal to across, as well as within, the bounds of identity, ideology, and community. A range of other actors, including nongovernmental organizations, can contribute as well. Formal and popular education could help spread those methods widely. Second, such normative and prescriptive accounts ought to be part of civic education and socialization. Clear rules of thumb and expectations would help individuals direct their own attention and offer them an important ethical dimension of judgment and guide their expressions of approval or disapproval. Moreover, third-party organizations—analogous to independent organizations that have emerged around fake news and open educational resources—might call out content or users that violate norms or demote the priority of such posts on news feeds. Some media critics suggest that the “golden age” of the mass media sphere in the second half of the twentieth century may have been a historical aberration, bracketed by periods of much greater misinformation, conspiracy theory, and uncivil conflict. While that period benefitted democratic governance in many ways, we should remember that it also limited the authors and speakers mostly to professional journalists reporting on political and business elites. And at least in the United States, the gatekeepers defended “consensus” visions of democratic capitalism, anti-communism, and US foreign policy. As the techno-optimists of the 1990s hoped, digitalization has broken the gates open, adding many more speakers and perspectives to the public sphere. But the quality is dismal, and it lacks orientations toward truth, common good, or civility. Looking forward schematically, we may end up with incremental modifications of the status quo digital public sphere. Large platform companies would continue to dominate the design and policy of social media. Advertising and other business objectives would remain primary, with a little more subscription revenue and some responsiveness to the worst communicative excesses. Or we may end up with more determined regulation of the supply side of the public sphere—perhaps by algorithmically or legally (through requirements on risk assessment and stronger standards on intermediary liability) demoting or taking down stories deemed to be false or harmful and by increasing the proportion of content produced by sources. we think that participant responsibilities must a central role in the of the digital public sphere in order to some of the qualities of the mass media public sphere—in of reliable information and access to the in by the digital public sphere. This level of public responsibility will not be easy to if it can be at But we think it is because we are not to the democratic of equal communicative freedom that would be do we think that a more role for platforms is the we can is a of the in and at of and of is of the to and author of A of and The of the and is the of and and the for and at the include in and The and of

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• How AI could take over elections – and undermine democracy

  2023-06-02 · 4 citations

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  Columbia University

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