Research and advocacy on disinformation typically portray social media users in two ways — as passive audiences and as active users. The former portrays people as vulnerable and homogenous consumers of disinformation, while the latter advances an active and heterogeneous characterisation of social media users as people harbouring deep stories that shape their political beliefs and experiences of disinformation online. Nicole Curato introduces an alternative characterization of social media users — the deliberative agent. This refers to social media users acting as citizens engaged in reflective and critical conversations with their peers to collectively make sense of disinformation. Such processes could generate plausible political projects that defend the public sphere from communicative distortions, including hyper-partisanship and affective polarization. Curato will illustrate deliberative agency in action through the example of the first deliberative forum on disinformation in the Philippines.
Nicole Curato is a Professor of Political Sociology at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She is the author of Democracy in a Time of Misery: From Spectacular Tragedy to Deliberative Action (Oxford University Press) and has written extensively on democratic innovations in fragile political contexts.
