Current debate is dominated by fears of the threats of digital technology for democracy. One typical example is the perceived threats of malicious actors promoting disinformation through digital channels to sow confusion and exacerbate political divisions. The prominence of the threat of digital disinformation in the public imagination, however, is not supported by empirical findings which instead indicate that disinformation is a limited problem with limited reach among the public. Its prominence in public discourse is instead best understood as a “moral panic.” In this article, we argue that we should shift attention from these evocative but empirically marginal phenomena of deviance connected with digital media toward the structural transformations that give rise to these fears, namely those that have impacted information flows and attention allocation in the public arena. This account centers on structural transformations of the public arena and associated new challenges, especially in relation to gatekeepers, old and new. How the public arena serves actually existing democracy will not be addressed by focusing on disinformation, but rather by addressing structural transformations and the new challenges that arise from these.

当前的辩论主要是对数字技术对民主的威胁的担忧。一个典型的例子是恶意行为者通过数字渠道传播虚假信息的种种威胁，从而造成混乱并加剧政治分歧。然而，在公众的想象中，数字信息失真威胁的突出性并没有得到经验发现的支持，这些经验表明，信息失真是一个有限的问题，在公众中影响力有限。相反，它在公共话语中的突出地位最好被理解为“道德恐慌”。在本文中，我们认为我们应该将注意力从与数字媒体相关的这些令人回味但凭经验的边缘性偏差现象转移到引起这些恐惧的结构性转变，即那些影响公共领域信息流和注意力分配的因素。该报告的重点是公共领域的结构转型以及相关的新挑战，尤其是在新老关守方面。公共领域如何实际服务于现有的民主，将不会通过专注于虚假信息来解决，而是通过解决结构性转变以及由此而产生的新挑战来解决。