Which public sphere is at stake? The competing visions of democracy in the EU field of disinformation

Public spheres are today very different objects from those that started the processes of globalization. One of the novel aspects of current public spheres is the growing influence of social media platforms and the disinformation that circulates in them. Despite the entrenchment of disinformation/post-truth politics as a political issue (Conrad et al. 2023), public authorities in the EU have so far been mostly reluctant to regulate technology companies in general and social media companies in particular. How to deal with disinformation is an open normative, empirical and political question in all liberal democracies. Our paper begins with the following research question: How does the normative conception of the public sphere condition the strategies to combat disinformation in the EU? To understand the process of building the EU's interest in disinformation and the cooperation networks between European media in the debate to combat disinformation in the EU, it is necessary to understand what is at stake for the different actors in the field of disinformation. We understand the concept of a ‘field’ from the relational perspective of political sociology and neo-institutionalism (Fligstein and McAdam, 2012) as a delimited and autonomous space of relatively stable positions and relationships in which the actors compete for social goods and resources produced in the field itself. In this case, what is at stake is the definition of the method and the most qualified actor to help the European institutions distinguish what is true from what is false (Tuñón Navarro, Oleart & Bouza García, 2019). We develop the hypothesis that the normative model that actors have of the public sphere influences the type of regulation that they put forward as a strategy to combat disinformation, and thus we do not only see a competition to define disinformation and how to combat it, but also to define what is the best model of democracy. In this way, we conceptually advance a theory that connects regulation to combat disinformation with different models of the public sphere. This allows us to anticipate which actors might be empowered (or disempowered) depending on how disinformation is defined, and what normative understanding of democracy and the public sphere lie behind it. We argue that there are different pre-existing fields, such as journalism (Michailidou and Trenz 2021) or international security, that are affected by the emergence of the new transnational field of disinformation and that the actors of each field will try to establish the rules of the game, and that it is precisely the pre-existence of these fields which leads the actors present in them to selectively politicize and depoliticize certain aspects at the expense of others in the disinformation regulatory debate (Oleart & Bouza, 2022). In doing so, our contribution to the literature is establishing the connection between different normative understandings of the public sphere, and differentiated policy approaches to address disinformation.