Public communication in liberal democracies faces a crisis, exacerbated by rapid technological changes in digital communication. Key factors include (1) fragmentation of informational commons, (2) polarization of hyper-partisan news ecologies, (3) consolidation of attention economies, (4) digitally amplified political populism, and (5) epistemic crises in public deliberation. However, these factors are asymmetrically distributed within democratic societies and are predominantly manifesting through far-right informational networks. Meanwhile, liberal institutions have been slow to adapt to the new communicative orders, often relying on tried and tested organizational practices and heuristics to understand and respond to these changes. I illustrate this by introducing the concept of a “phantom counter-public.” Drawing on Walter Lippmann’s classic the “phantom public,” this can be understood as an interpretative lens, through which far-right informational networks are viewed and transformed into a collectively imagined community. Liberal institutions that regard these digitally amplified formations as counter-publics effectively apply the same norms to them as they may have done with previous progressive movement actors pushing for access to the public sphere. Yet when they do so, they are embracing and amplifying fundamentally illiberal ideas and actors engaged in an ideological project of dismantling the very institutional foundation they are demanding access to.