The discourse on the regulation of the digital economy is gaining momentum both in Europe and in other countries and regions. At the European level, which is the focus of this paper, discussion initially centered on the Digital Market Act and the Digital Services Act. Attention has increasingly shifted to the AI act being prepared in the European Commission and the European Parliament. Controversy abounds on effective policy measures to regulate the digital transformation. The inter-ests of different agents in bureaucratic/political/economic fields are continually mobilized in lobbying efforts. Within the framework of these disputes – latently as well as openly contested conflicts – data is weaponized in the shaping of a public opinion that, so Bourdieu, ‘does not exist’ (1972). Habermas (1962), by contrast, regarded public opinion surveys as integral to a public sphere, which he deems constitutive of democracy as such, but also dangerously subject to biased suasion. Though Haber-mas continues to revise his theory of communicative action, most recently in light of perceived threats from digitization and social media (Habermas 2022), Bourdieu arguably provides a better field guide to navigating the virtual arena. However, Bourdieu’s radical scepticism and critique of bracketed publics and causal reductionist quantification seems apt as ever. On this theoretical back-ground, the paper examines how public opinion is invoked in discourses on digitization and digital economy in the form of Eurobarometer surveys. In particular, indicators of social space and symbolic power (Wacquant 2019; Blasius, Lebaron, LeRoux, Schmitz eds. 2019; Atkinson, Schmitz 2022) are extrapolated using simple and multiple correspondence analyses as well as cluster analysis to re-veal the epistemic salience as well as limitations of such surveys (Bourdieu, 1972; Blasius and Thiessen 2006).