Algorithmic Content Curation: Between Deliberation and Discord

• In Event: Algorithms and Democracy

Abstract

Amidst the evolving new history of how algorithms curate and censor the media and content democratic citizens engage with in their digital life, I interrogate whether this engagement can be meaningfully understood within the deliberative framework. By analyzing modes of algorithmic content curation in specific contexts, I shed light on the difficulty it presents to validly informed public deliberation. By contrasting the objectives of John Dryzek’s discursive designs as he defines them in Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science, with the definitional components of an algorithmic curation, I find algorithmic curation elides an important part of deliberation by automating the critical work of deciding what is permissible speech, and what is not. Just as others note that public discourse needs to be free of structural coercion – I argue it should also be free of algorithmic coercion. To this end the paper ultimately argues for a new category within democratic discourse studies – deliberative moderation – and ends by advocating for the democratization of the recursive public of technicians, coders, and developers who design the algorithms which are shaping our digital lives.

Author

• Janet Marie Lawler, University of Houston