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The Yale Law Journal - Forum: Beyond the Public Square: Imagining Digital Democracy

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ABSTRACT.To create online spaces that do not merely replicate existing hierarchies and reinforce unequal distributions of social, economic, cultural, and political power, we must move beyond the simplistic cliché of the unregulated public square and commit to the hard work of designing for democracy. When we say ‘public square,’ . . . we need to ask—who or what is this public? Who owns this space, what makes it public? . . . This is the essence of democracy: the ability to question power, and the power to do so.1 – Tom Wilkinson In the 2017 case Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court declared that the internet is “the modern public square.”2 This claim has been repeated so often by politicians, tech industry leaders, civil libertarians, and scholars that it has achieved the status of conventional wisdom. Proponents of the claim point not only to the vast array of activities now conducted online, but also to the public’s increasing reliance on social-media platforms such as Fac

This essay is part of a collection Envisioning Equitable Online Governance This Collection examines how inequality manifests on social media platforms and in the digital public sphere. Essays analyze how race, gender, and other facets of identity shape people’s experience of and access to the digital public sphere and explore the harms minority groups suffer in these spaces. Several Essays chart paths for legislative reform. The Forum publishes this Collection in collaboration with the Information Society Project (ISP), including ISP Fellows Elettra Bietti and Adam Posluns, and with the genero

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