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Javnost - The Public, Vol. 33 - 2026, No. 2
Who Gets to Appear? Algorithmic Publicity and the Crisis of Democratic Visibility
Digital platforms transform public visibility through algorithmic systems that sort and prioritise content according to engagement logics. This article introduces the concept of “algorithmic publicity” to analyse how platform infrastructures reshape the conditions of public appearance—a central concern for debates on publicness (Öffentlichkeit). Rather than treating visibility as discursive competition, the concept foregrounds the infrastructural mechanisms governing the distribution of attention. The argument unfolds in three movements. First, it shows how platform capitalism operates through infrastructuralisation, as platforms evolve from discrete services into foundational systems that organise social coordination while capturing attention and extracting value. Second, it develops algorithmic publicity as an analytical category and distinguishes it from adjacent concepts, including regimes of visibility as well as approaches to algorithmic governance and surveillance capitalism. Third, it examines how the feed operationalises these dynamics, producing measurable inequalities of visibility and pre-structuring public experience. By focusing on the infrastructural production of visibility, algorithmic publicity helps explain how platform environments reconfigure democratic publicity. The article concludes that the crisis of the public sphere stems not from communicative dysfunctions alone, but from the infrastructural transformation of visibility conditions, requiring a shift beyond better discourse toward different architectures of public appearance. The article makes a primarily conceptual contribution, illustrating the framework through selected empirical cases and opening a comparative research agenda.