Digital social networks and messaging applications are an increasingly popular channel of information, communication and action. In democratic processes such as elections and referendums, they are also a very important part of the arena where the results are played out. Informational capitalism, supported by data, corporate platforms and processes of supervision and supervolition, redefine today’s political processes.
The constitution of multitudinous identities, connective action and networked movements, on the one hand, and, on the other, the propagation of fake news, the proliferation of bots and mercenary accounts, the automated viralization of contents and, above all, the practices of using big data and corporate platforms for intervening in these processes, generate a mutating public sphere to be explored, the field of Realpolitik of the 21st century, the datapolitik.
For this reason, we collaborate in the project “DataPolitik. Data science against disinformation” with Heurística, a data and policy observatory to study the mechanisms involved and the methods used by different actors in the datacratic construction of public opinion and political sentiment. To explore this we have several specific subprojects and organize the Datapolitik and the PCNET sessions. If in our Interidentity project we deepen the understanding of the emergence and constitution of network identities, in DataPolitik we analyze how different actors try to influence their emergence or, directly, to simulate them artificially.In short, we try to understand and analyze the data-based dynamics that define politics today, so that in projects such as Decidim and DECODE, we try to build alternatives.