Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Margetts, Helen

Titel

9. Rethinking Democracy with Social Media

Ist Teil von

• The Political quarterly (London. 1930), 2019-01, Vol.90 (S1), p.107-123

Ort / Verlag

London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Social media are blamed for almost everything that is wrong with democracy. They are held responsible for pollution of the democratic environment through fake news, junk science, computational propaganda and aggressive microtargeting and political advertising. They are accused of creating political filter bubbles, where citizens exist in ever narrower 'echo chambers' of personalised news and connections with like-minded people, which mean that they are exposed only to similar ideological viewpoints, feeding their own opinions back to themselves and creating a 'Daily Me' news environment. In turn, these phenomena have been implicated in the rise of populism, political polarisation, waves of hate against women and minorities, far-right extremism and radicalisation, post-truth, political chaos, the end of democracy and ultimately, the death of democracy. Discussion of social media's role in democracy sounds like a premature lament for a sick patient, without investigating the prognosis. Yet, actually we know rather little about the relationship between social media and democracy. In their ten years of existence, social media have injected volatility and instability into political systems, bringing a continual cast of unpredictable events. They have challenged normative models of democracy-by which we might understand the macro-level shifts at work-seeming to make possible the highest hopes and worst fears of republicanism and pluralism. They have transformed the ecology of interest groups and mobilisations which challenge elites and ruling institutions, bringing regulatory decay and policy sclerosis. They create undercurrents of political life that burst to the surface in seemingly random ways, making fools of opinion polls.But although the platforms themselves generate new sources of real-time transactional data that might be used to understand this changed environment, most of this data is proprietary and inaccessible to researchers, meaning that the revolution in big data and data science has passed by democracy research. This chapter looks at the available evidence regarding the effect of social media on democracy, for which-as for Mark Twain-the report of death may be an exaggeration.