“And what kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm, which more than any other sphere of human life guarantees the reality of existence to men who are born and die—that is, to beings who know that they have appeared from non-being and that, after a while, they will disappear into it again?”
(Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics, 2019, p. 30)
Making truth real is both the raison d’être of democracy and its Sisyphean task. What makes a way of life, a violated right or a denied opportunity into a reality worthy of attention and deliberation? What turns a fact into a discursive event, transforming an ordinary occurrence into a gravitational field for public discourse, political positioning and decision-making?
Öffentlichkeit (Habermas, 2006)—the process through which something becomes a matter of public concern—is neither a fixed criterion nor the sum of a set of criteria. It is a continuous and relentless process of gaining and accumulating visibility, unfolding unevenly across the public sphere. In doing so, it reproduces the architectures and structures of that sphere, as well as the barriers that constrain it and the channels that shape its direction.
Democracy in an Information Crisis
For some time now, we have become aware that the algorithmic infrastructure filtering, amplifying and clustering the processes of contemporary public opinion fosters polarisation, fragmentation, individualisation and information disorder. The numerous initiatives aimed at strengthening the moderation of content published on social media, intensifying fact-checking efforts and expanding media literacy programmes have failed to produce the desired results.
According to a recent Eurobarometer survey, 49% of European citizens believe that the most serious challenge facing European democracies is growing distrust in institutions and democratic processes; 42% point to the risk of manipulation and disinformation, while 32% identify the lack of transparency surrounding AI-generated content as a major concern.
It is perhaps no coincidence that, within this communicative regime of “post-reliability” (post-affidabilità, Boccia Artieri, 2025), traditional journalism is gradually losing ground to a fragmented and competitive array of influencers. Within spaces increasingly shaped by personalised relationships of trust, partisan political narratives are gaining ground, often made even more insidious by their proclaimed distance from institutional politics.
According to an EU study, a lack of transparency and a widespread sense of distrust are among the prevailing concerns of European citizens.
Artificial Intelligence and Possible Cross-Pollinations
On the one hand, it is becoming increasingly important to explore possible forms of cross-pollination with the vernacular codes emerging from grassroots communication on digital platforms. On the other, we must not lose sight of the larger issue towards which all these signals appear to point.
Among the many causes behind this widespread distrust are undoubtedly the failure to democratise, and the structural opacity surrounding, the forms, conditions and consequences of the technological mediation to which the Öffentlichkeit is currently subjected.
In a recent position paper, The Era of Answer Engines, examining the impact of generative artificial intelligence on online search services, Ofcom, the UK media regulator, warned of the risk that separating content from its original sources could create an “attribution gap” among users, undermining their ability to critically assess where information comes from.
At the same time, the publics that now take shape on social media platforms are increasingly dependent on interest clusters created by recommendation systems according to criteria of statistical proximity that may be broadly inferred, but are never publicly disclosed.
The paradox is that these publics, despite being crucial hubs of global public opinion, have no control over the conditions of their own emergence and are unable to challenge the automated mechanisms that may shape them.
In Europe, 67% of people fear that AI could be used to manipulate elections.
“Opening the Black Box”
The result is a relentless erosion of citizens’ epistemic agency—that is, their capacity to exercise conscious and systematic oversight over the ways in which both their own knowledge and the collective dimension towards which they direct their political imagination are constructed.
Any attempt to address the crisis of the contemporary public sphere must therefore include a process of democratising the technology on which civic and political experience increasingly depends.
This means opening the black box and subjecting it to the same principles of accountability and popular sovereignty on which democratic government itself is founded. Only then will it become possible to understand and shape the material and symbolic logics that currently govern the relentless transformation of reality.
Article originally published in Issue No. 62 of Bolle e balle
