The digital oligarchic public sphere: contesting human rights in the age of billionaires

This article develops the concept of the digital oligarchic public sphere to analyze how tech billionaires, through proprietary algorithms, platform architectures, and data infrastructures, assert control over what counts as visible, credible, and contestable knowledge. Drawing on Habermasian public-sphere theory, neo-Gramscian hegemony, and surveillance capitalism literature, the analysis identifies three mechanisms: algorithmic hegemony, epistemic monopolization, and normative capture – which reconfigure digital spaces into regimes of engineered consent. Evidence from Gaza, the Philippines, India, the United States, and Europe reveals how these mechanisms align with authoritarian regimes to suppress dissent, reshape class formation, and violate rights of expression, privacy, and due process. By uniting sociological insights on cultural and epistemic inequality with International Relations’ emphasis on transnational power dynamics and human-rights scholarship's focus on rights-in-practice, this work offers a conceptual vocabulary for understanding how digital infrastructures become sites of struggle over rights and dignity.