Legal chilling effects in the algorithmic public sphere: a communicative framework for digital expression criminalization in emerging democracies

Abstract

The criminalization of digital expression through expansive information laws represents a critical yet undertheorized threat to democratic communication in emerging democracies. While legal scholarship has examined specific legislative provisions, the communicative dimensions of this phenomenon, particularly how the prosecution of online expression systematically distorts the digital public sphere, remain inadequately conceptualized. Drawing on Habermas's theory of communicative action, algorithmic media studies, and critical legal communication theory, this article introduces the Digital Legal Communication Deficit (DLCD) framework to help explain how information laws that disregard the contextual, algorithmic, and participatory nature of digital communication produce cascading chilling effects that extend far beyond individual cases. Using Indonesia's Electronic Information and Transactions Law (UU ITE) as a primary case, supported by data from over 530 criminalization cases (2019–2024), survey evidence of self-censorship among journalists and the general public, and analysis of the Delpedro Marhaen (2025) and Septia Dwi Pertiwi (2024) prosecutions, we argue that digital expression criminalization exhibits the characteristics of a structural distortion of the digital public sphere, a pattern consistent with DLCD mechanisms and warranting systematic comparative investigation across multiple jurisdictions and legal contexts, rather than a sequence of isolated legal transgressions. The DLCD framework offers a communicative lens for evaluating information laws and for informing proportionate, contextually sensitive digital regulation in emerging democracies globally.

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