Digital Citizens Engaging with Information Politics, Transparency and Surveillance Ramón Reichert, Karin Wenz (eds.) This issue of the Digital Culture & Society journal invites theoretical and artistic contributions on citizen engagement, digital citizenship and grassroots information politics. Today, engagement and participation are considered key when we investigate media and user practices. Participation has become a popular imperative of digital societies: “Calls for greater transparency and participation are heard not just by elected officials, but also in corporate headquarters” (Geiselhart, 2004). A number of theoretical reflections on digital societies assume that social media are becoming a dominant media channel for participatory engagement. Practices of participation and engagement are an indispensible part of our digital everyday lives: from chat rooms to community forums, from social media platforms to image boards, and from rating platforms to whistle-blowing websites. The Internet is used for a wide variety of forms of participation in culture, education, health, business and politics. On the one hand these 'digital collectives' are deemed the torchbearers of the coming social and political transformation or hailed as self-organized collective intelligence. On the other hand state apparatuses are asking for participative activities to increase efficiency and to avoid friction. It is argued that the use of technology fosters participation and processes of consensus-building. This discourse almost implies that these processes can be hardwired into digital technologies. The terms “cultural citizenship” and “digital citizenship” are expected to provide a broader but also a more critical approach to citizen engagement. In the meantime, there are numerous studies that examine the different forms and effects of participation on the Internet and its limitations (e.g. Fuchs, 2014; Trottier/Fuchs, 2015). Critical voices show that participation has long become a buzz word, often related to one- sided, positive perspectives: applauding the possibilities of user engagement and ignoring issues such as information politics and a digital divide, not only based on technological access but also on a lack of digital literacy (e.g. Jordan, 2015; van Dijck et al., 2017). We observe not only liberation of users based on participatory practices but exploitation at the