Introduction
In recent years, there has been a significant surge in the number of research studies examining the impact of social media platforms on democracy. Many of these studies have come from various traditional academic fields such as political science, psychology, law, communications, economics, and emerging disciplines like data science and artificial intelligence (AI). Growing concerns about the negative effects of social media platforms on the integrity of democratic practices have driven this surge.
Studies concerning the relationship between social media platforms and democracy underwent a notable change in 2016, with a growing focus on negative impacts. The U.S. presidential election and the Brexit referendum highlighted the influence of interaction dynamics on these platforms and their susceptibility to manipulation.
This development involves a remarkable paradox. Early research on the impact of digital technology and the Internet was largely optimistic, if not dreamy. Many early pioneers viewed the Internet as a liberating technology, a form of unrestricted free communication that could help bring down authoritarian regimes and promote freedom worldwide.
Despite the decline of this optimistic perception, at least in its more radical forms, it has remained robust. This was reinforced for a time by social media platforms’ significant role in the early stages of the Arab Spring revolutions that began in late 2010.
Has the initial optimism surrounding the Internet and social media’s potential to foster and disseminate democracy been revealed as a mere illusion, ultimately shattered by practical experience? Is it inevitable that these prevalent uses of digital technology present an existential threat to democracy in the digital age, jeopardizing and potentially eradicating it?
This paper proposes that the impact of social media platforms on democracy isn’t necessarily about the fundamental concepts of either, but rather about their practical application. The paper first discusses the concept of democracy and the essential rights required for its realization, examining their intersection with social media platforms.
Additionally, the paper addresses phenomena fostered by social media platforms that hinder healthy democratic life and potentially pose an existential threat to it. It also explores future possibilities for a radical change in the application of the social media concept within a digital world, where negative phenomena arising from current applications can be confronted and overcome.
Democracy and Political Participation
Neither the Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights explicitly uses the term “democracy” in any of their articles. However, both documents (Article 21 of the Declaration and Article 25 of the Covenant) affirm three key elements that together constitute the essential conditions for what is commonly referred to as democratic governance.
These elements are: the right to participate in public affairs, either directly or through freely chosen representatives; the right to periodic and fair elections held by universal suffrage without discrimination and by secret ballot; and the right to hold public office without discrimination.
Together, these elements represent the minimum necessary guarantees for democracy. In addition to these, there are several rights enshrined in international and regional human rights treaties and conventions, as well as in national constitutions, which are essential for establishing a healthy democratic life. Among these rights are:
The right to freedom of conscience and opinion:
The right of individuals to form their own opinions without interference or external pressure and without being harmed, either personally or in terms of their interests, as a result of adopting any opinion. This right includes opinions and stances related to public affairs, making it essential for enabling individuals to participate in public affairs. Such participation cannot be realized unless people can freely form their views without external interference or coercion.
The right to freedom of expression:
Individuals have the right to use any available means to create and publicly share messages expressing their opinions, beliefs, and stances. This right represents a fundamental component of democracy. It encompasses opinions, beliefs, and stances on public affairs, ensuring freedom of the press and media, and other means of informing citizens of and discussing issues of public concern. This right also encompasses collective means of expressing political opinions and stances, such as demonstrations, marches, and sit-ins.
The right to access information:
Every individual has the right to seek and share information through various means. This includes citizens’ right to access government-held information related to public affairs, policies, and methods of governance. Access to such information is necessary for enabling citizens to form their opinions and positions on issues of public concern.
The right to assembly:
Individuals have the right to gather and create groups in various organizational forms to pursue common goals. These forms include political parties, political advocacy groups, labor and professional unions, and civil society organizations in the broadest sense. Such organizations enable citizens to actively participate in public affairs, shape and influence state policies, and reach consensual solutions to conflicting group interests within society.
Freedom of Expression and the Voice of the Common Man
Throughout history, the practical exercise of freedom of expression has been intertwined with the available technologies for mass communication. For instance, the invention of the printing press transformed the course of history by exponentially expanding the ability to disseminate messages to unprecedented numbers of people.
Similarly, technological progress, marked by the telegraph, radio, television broadcasting, and satellite transmission, has broadened the scope of mass communication. While each development substantially increased the potential audience, a key similarity across these technologies is that the expansion of message consumers consistently outpaced the growth of message creators.
The fundamental leap achieved by digital technology was the emergence of the Internet and social media platforms. For the first time in human history, the production and dissemination of mass messages expanded on an unprecedented scale, making the number of content creators and senders nearly equal to the number of recipients. Anyone with internet access can create an account on a social media platform and, in doing so, gain the ability to produce and publish content that an unlimited number of others can access.
This phenomenon signifies, in one sense, the disappearance of what was once called “the common man.” A key definition of this term is someone lacking the necessary means to make their voice heard and influential. Digital technology has dramatically lowered the threshold for these requirements, reducing them to a bare minimum, especially with the proliferation of internet-connected smartphones.
According to the latest statistics, there are currently around 3.07 billion active users on Facebook. These users represent approximately 37.8% of the world’s total population. In theory, any content posted by one of these users could be accessible to all the others.
For Enlightenment-era democratic thinkers, a platform like Facebook would embody their most ambitious dreams. Ultimately, these thinkers viewed the enjoyment of freedom of expression by individuals in society as the cornerstone for establishing a truly democratic life. When every person’s voice can be heard by others, it creates the potential to influence them. This ultimately ensures that the majority’s voices become impossible to ignore.
In today’s practical reality, a term like “the power of the Internet” perfectly embodies this concept. Countless instances exist where social media users’ involvement with particular matters has directly impacted governmental decisions within various nations.
The power of mass expression through social media platforms has driven the creation of new legislation and the repeal or suspension of others. It has also brought private issues into the spotlight, turning them into matters of public concern. This now occurs almost daily, to the extent that state institutions closely monitor public opinion trends as reflected on social media platforms and increasingly respond to them through those very same platforms.
The power of the Internet goes beyond the boundaries of traditional political practices. As expressed through social media platforms, public opinion can exert significant influence without relying on political parties or parliamentary representation. This is evident in the extent to which the power of the Internet shapes outcomes even in non-democratic countries, where there is neither freedom to form political parties nor free and fair elections.
Today, social media platforms serve as a tool for the will of the people to express themselves directly and without intermediaries. Of course, mass surveillance and content censorship tools still exert significant influence, setting boundaries on what can and cannot be expressed through these platforms. However, it remains possible to circumvent such controls. In any case, these tools cannot entirely erase the space for expression, a space in which the power of the Internet continues to have a strong and undeniable impact.
Undoubtedly, countless challenges surround the actual practice of the right to freedom of expression through social media platforms, some of which will be discussed in the following sections. What cannot be denied is that these platforms, at the very least, offer a broader- if only theoretical- possibility for a greater number of individuals to exercise their right to express their opinions, beliefs, and positions. What also cannot be denied is that this inevitably impacts the practice of democracy in any society.
What remains unresolved is the answer to whether this impact is necessarily positive or if it is a mix of both positives and negatives. There is also the question of whether the influence of social media platforms supports existing forms of democratic practice or, on the contrary, threatens to undermine them. If that is the case, then what alternative does it favor? Is it an alternative that better embodies the spirit of democracy, or is it completely non-democratic?
The Right to Assembly and Spaces for Political Activity
The actual practice of the right to assembly- that is, engaging in collective action- has long been constrained by numerous obstacles. Most of these obstacles relate to communicating with the broadest possible people base. The greater the number of people who can be reached, the easier it becomes to connect with those who share the same goals and interests. There are also practical barriers to transforming shared goals and interests into an actual capacity for joint action to express, pursue, and defend these goals and interests.
There is no doubt that the advancement of communication technology over the past two centuries has been a driving force in overcoming these obstacles. The emergence of large mass political parties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was closely linked to the rapid development of communication means.
The emergence of what is now called cyberspace has created a virtual world almost free of traditional communication barriers. This, theoretically, means that those who share the same goals and interests can now communicate freely in ways that were not possible in any previous era. They can also create digital tools for gathering and coordinating collective action. The rise of social media platforms has greatly amplified the effectiveness of exercising the right to assemble in the virtual cyber world, as these platforms provide a potential audience that can reach hundreds of millions.
In some countries, entire societies are almost fully present on one social media platform or another. This allows various groups and organizations to reach an unlimited base of their potential audience. It means a greater possibility to recruit more individuals to their side and to coordinate among them to create a larger impact on public policies related to their goals and interests.
For over two centuries, proponents of democracy have held that a cornerstone of a democratic society is the capacity to authentically reflect the varied aims and interests of societal groups, ensuring representation mirrors their actual proportions. This is precisely what makes the right to assembly one of the necessary conditions for a healthy democratic life. Therefore, removing the traditional obstacles to the right to assemble represents an important positive leap toward achieving a more just application of democracy.
However, numerous challenges surround the actual practice of the right to assemble through social media platforms. Ultimately, people can gather around countless affiliations, and not all of these affiliations are perfectly, or even at all, compatible with democratic principles. The influence of social media platforms on democracy through their tools that enable the exercise of the right to assemble cannot be denied. Nevertheless, determining whether this influence is positive or negative is highly complex and requires consideration of many factors.
Traditional Practices and New Tools
Suppose a broad and less rigid definition of the concept of politician is used to include anyone who exercises or seeks to exercise political power in a society. In that case, it can be argued that politicians have existed in human societies since their inception.
There has never been a time when politicians have missed an opportunity to use any means of mass communication without using it in their endeavors. From storytellers’ circles in primitive societies to modern mass media, politicians have sought to craft messages for political propaganda and disseminate them to the broadest possible audience.
Political propaganda followed a different path from commercial advertising for a long time. However, with the emergence of modern mass communication tools, starting with the press, then radio, and television, the two paths began to converge, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between them. Consequently, when the Internet appeared, followed by social media platforms, there was nothing to prevent politicians from joining commercial companies to exploit the Internet’s tremendous capabilities for targeted marketing.
In addition to amplifying and intensifying the effectiveness of direct political propaganda, social media platforms have given rise to new phenomena that politicians were quick to exploit in favor of their agendas. Among the most noteworthy of these phenomena is the rise of influencers. Major companies and global brands worldwide heavily rely on influencers on social media platforms to promote their products. Similarly, politicians seek to recruit and utilize influencers to serve their own promotional and political objectives.
The key difference between the two lies in their fundamental commonality: both influencers and politicians primarily market themselves before promoting any product or political agenda. This inherent similarity has easily blurred the boundaries between influencers and politicians. Today, numerous politicians actively rebrand themselves as social media influencers.
Donald Trump serves as a prime example of a politician utilizing social media as an influencer. This is evident when contrasting his social media content with a more traditional politician like Joe Biden’s online presence.
The dominance of a commercial marketing nature over political propaganda has meant, from the outset, a gradual shift away from addressing voters’ rational faculties toward manipulating their irrational and emotional biases. This trend has been reinforced by the fact that the most impactful political issues—those directly affecting people’s lives—have increasingly become the domain of technocrats: specialized experts in economics, industry, security, and defense.
This shift toward reliance on specialized technical expertise has naturally distanced public debate and political decision-making from broad popular participation. Moreover, it has created greater space for the influence of propaganda based on emotional appeal rather than logical analysis and rational discourse.
Thus, the arena of political competition has, for several decades now, effectively shifted to what can be called identity politics; that is, the politicization of cultural, ethnic, and religious differences. Experience over recent years has shown that social media platforms deepen these differences by exploiting them to increase engagement rates within the platform.
The dilemma democracy faces in this context is that it is fundamentally based on the participation of citizens in managing public affairs through dialogue and competition to offer the most consensual solutions to shared concerns. However, when these common concerns are sidelined or reduced to mere fronts for unrelated biases, democracy itself turns into a facade that conceals identity-based conflicts.
Obstacles to Democracy on Social Media Platforms
Misinformation and Fake News
Information refers to any message formulated as a declarative statement (i.e., not interrogative or imperative). This definition does not guarantee the information’s validity, which typically depends on its correspondence to reality. An infinite number of declarative statements can be constructed that do not reflect reality, or even defy logic. Information can be misleading if it is incorrect and leads those who believe it to conclusions they would not have reached otherwise.
On the other hand, news represents a specific type of information. It refers to information that reports the occurrence of an event, usually with a specified time of occurrence. For example, saying that the mass of one liter of distilled water weighs one kilogram is information, but it does not qualify as news.
However, saying that ten people died in a collision that occurred this morning is both information and news. Like any piece of information, news can be false when it reports an event that did not actually happen. Any false news can be considered misleading when someone deliberately formulates and disseminates it.
There’s a profound connection between the information people receive and their role in influencing public affairs. Ultimately, people form their perceptions, opinions, and stances based on the information available to them, whether accurate, misleading, or false. False information often leads to people being misled, such that their participation in managing public affairs does not result in positive outcomes.
Ironically, democracy is fundamentally indifferent to the factual accuracy of information on which people base their political views and stances. Democracy is only concerned with ensuring that people have the right to participate in the management of public affairs.
However, the neutrality of democracy as a principle toward the truth or falsehood of information does not mean that false or misleading information poses no threat to it. On the contrary, it renders democracy highly vulnerable to the impact of false information, to the extent that it can threaten democracy’s very existence.
When public participation in governance relies increasingly on misinformation, the outcome is inevitably more flawed and potentially catastrophic policies. This ultimately leads to a loss of trust in democracy itself as a system of government. The public may assume that the disastrous outcomes threatening their interests resulted from practicing democracy; consequently, they can be persuaded that minority rule or autocracy might avoid what appear to be the drawbacks of broad participation in managing their affairs.
In recent times, the Internet and social media platforms have become the primary arena for disseminating misinformation and fake news on an unprecedented historical scale. While free access to information can be a boon for democracy, it can equally become its bane. Many individuals, for various reasons, tend to believe certain information over others based on subjective, pre-existing biases.
One of the main reasons behind this is that the fabrication of false information heavily relies on exploiting the cognitive and emotional biases of the target audience. When false information is presented in a way that aligns with the beliefs or desires of the intended audience, it becomes much easier for them to believe it and share it without scrutiny.
This mechanism is not exclusive to social media platforms. It applies to any mass communication medium that seeks to influence public opinion. However, social media platforms stand out as being more effective, faster, and far-reaching than traditional media. They allow information, whether true or false, to reach massive numbers of users in record time.
Social media platforms exploit users’ biases, preferences, and inclinations to deliver highly targeted and concentrated promotional messages. The goal is to maximize interaction and profits, leveraging the effectiveness of commercial advertising techniques used to promote goods and services. However, as an unintended consequence, these same mechanisms amplify the spread and penetration of false and misleading information, since they are based on the same psychological principles that underpin commercial advertising strategies.
Fueling Polarization and Supporting Extremism
It is nearly impossible to imagine a society that does not contain some degree of diversity in terms of religious belief, ethnicity, or cultural heritage. However, societies differ in the relative weight of their various identity groups. Some societies are highly diverse to the extent that specific identity groups constitute large population blocks that cannot be ignored.
In some of these societies, polarization around identity differences, particularly ethnic or religious, can reach a level that threatens the cohesion of both the society and the state. Establishing a democratic society under such conditions becomes extremely difficult. Democracy requires at least a minimum capacity among the various components of society to find common ground for cooperation and continuous dialogue.
On the other hand, the lack of diversity leads some societies, dominated by cultural, religious, and ethnic homogeneity, toward isolationism and pathological distrust of the “other.” This creates an environment predisposed to accepting authoritarianism and one-person rule. In such societies, democracy also struggles to take root and flourish.
For centuries, many societies have suffered from intensified internal and external conflicts fueled by extreme polarization and growing radicalization around singular identities opposed to others. Both excessive polarization and extremism create environments hostile to democratic flourishing. Consequently, any factors exacerbating these tendencies pose a dual threat: undermining democracies where they exist and sabotaging prospects for democratic rule where it is absent.
Both phenomena, polarization and extremism, are rooted in the dominance of particular discourses within societies, alongside manifestations of class disparity, oppression, persecution, and discrimination. Self-isolation is one of the main contributing factors that foster the development of narratives that fuel polarization and support extremism.
At its inception, the Internet, as an open medium of communication, appeared to be a historic turning point in enabling equitable interaction between diverse communities and identities. This allowed for a broader openness to diversity and difference, thanks to the ability to encounter the “other” outside the confines of traditional narratives, often portraying them as existential enemies.
However, practical experience has proven that the realization of cyberspace’s promise of openness to diversity remains conditional on factors that are difficult to achieve in reality. On the contrary, the rise of social media platforms has marked a step in the opposite direction, due to their business model, which fundamentally relies on exploiting identity-based biases and capitalizing on them to maximize profits.
The business model of social media platforms is based on knowing users at the deepest possible level. This makes it easier to market goods and services to users, and to use them to attract and cluster as many of their peers as possible. The goal is to increase the efficiency of mass-targeted marketing at a lower cost.
Social media models can inadvertently take advantage of confirmation bias. This psychological tendency leads individuals to favor information that confirms their existing views. Because people with similar backgrounds often provide this type of reinforcing content, social groups tend to form around shared viewpoints.
This leads to the emergence of phenomena such as echo chambers, closed and isolated environments in which participants circulate information based on how much it confirms and deepens their preexisting biases. Foremost among these biases are those rooted in religious, ideological, or ethnic identity.
In the end, the operating mechanisms of social media platforms contribute to the fragmentation of cyberspace into multiple self-contained and isolated spheres that are often marked by mutual suspicion and distrust. These different spheres reflect the identity-based divisions within each society and across societies separated by political borders in the real world.
The role of social media in fueling polarization and extremism in cyberspace leads to disastrous consequences in the real world. Notably, Facebook has been implicated in facilitating violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar. Additionally, social media has been widely exploited during the civil war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.On the other hand, the growing polarization, fueled by social media platforms, in one of the world’s largest democracies, the United States, has recently begun to threaten democratic governance there for the first time in its history.
Deliberate Manipulation of Public Opinion
The “Traditional Practices and New Tools” section discussed how social media platforms have influenced the evolution of political propaganda and its impact on democracy. What the current section addresses appears similar to political propaganda, but is actually something different. To understand this, it is essential to pay attention to the phrase “traditional practices” in the title of the referenced section.
Ultimately, social media platforms have added another influential impetus to a trajectory that political propaganda was already on. This trajectory may not have been as dangerous to democracy as it is today without the enormous capabilities given to it by digital technology and the AI algorithms used by these platforms. But in the end, it was not a new path created by this technology. What is new is the pre-planned exploitation of social media platforms’ capabilities and modus operandi to achieve a specific political goal through calculated manipulation of public opinion.
The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted the potential for social media platforms to gather personal data from vast numbers of users without their consent. The data could then be used for psychological targeting of specific demographics, to influence their choices, including how they vote in elections. This methodology was exploited during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, to a lesser extent, during the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom in the same year.
Regardless of the measures taken after the exposure of this scandal, the truth is that it proves the idea’s potential for success, making its development and replication a real possibility. Unlike political propaganda in its various forms, these are by no means tools for delivering messages to the public that exploit their conscious biases. These tools entail a complete usurpation of free will through direct psychological influence on individuals in a way that makes it difficult for them to perceive.
This new tool for deep manipulation of public opinion could not have existed without digital technology, specifically social media platforms. Current technological trends indicate that the technologies underlying planned public opinion manipulation tools will continue to evolve at an accelerating pace. This means that the effectiveness of these tools will increase, making them even more challenging to detect over time.
Deep manipulation of public opinion represents a unique kind of threat. It does not endanger democracy by attacking it from the outside as much as it risks undermining it from within. This means that it threatens to hollow out democracy’s substance while its superficial shell may remain intact. Hence, all the outward manifestations of democratic governance could continue to function perfectly.
For example, voters could go to the polls and cast their ballots in elections that are completely free and fair in appearance. Yet, the results of those elections could be predetermined and meticulously engineered. And elections would not be the only target. The precise steering of public opinion has virtually limitless applications, and there are no exclusive rights to using these tools; they will be available to anyone willing and able to pay the right price.
The Future of Democracy in a Digital World
Possibilities for Addressing Democratic Challenges on Social Media Platforms
Overcoming obstacles to democracy in the digital realm requires fundamental changes to the current structure of cyberspace. As an essential first step, we must abandon the illusion that cyberspace is apolitical; it is already politicized. Promoting the opposite notion only contributes to its growing exploitation for political purposes under the guise of being merely a product of economic activity governed by market rules.
Across all the issues discussed in the previous sections of this paper, references consistently pointed out the business model of social media platforms and their operational mechanisms. Ultimately, we cannot avoid acknowledging the responsibility of this business model for the various phenomena that pose threats to democracy.
As long as cyberspace is regarded merely as a product of economic activity, there is no room to discuss modifying the business model of one of its components. After all, any profit-seeking economic entity has the right to choose the business model that allows it to maximize its profits.
However, the reality is that cyberspace today is a virtual world that spans the breadth of the real world and is fully integrated with it. If each of these realms operates under a different set of rules, the conflict between these two sets of rules will persist until one ultimately prevails over the other.
All current indicators suggest that the economic rules governing cyberspace are more likely to prevail over the political rules of the real world. This would mean that cyberspace engulfs the physical reality, subjecting the world to the rule of big tech companies. In such a world, there would be no room for anything but a nominal hollow democracy or authoritarian regimes serving global capitalism.
The first step toward avoiding this fate is to see cyberspace for what it truly is. In reality, cyberspace is an additional dimension of the real world, where individuals live through their digital presence. And if political rules govern human coexistence and citizenship in the physical world, then those rules must also govern cyberspace.
In other words, cyberspace must also be subject to a democratic system of governance as a public domain in which every citizen has the guaranteed right to participate in its management, either directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Once this is achieved, it becomes possible to displace the business model responsible for amplifying and sustaining the obstacles to democracy. This would open the way to addressing and limiting these obstacles using the very tools made available by digital technology itself.
If internet governance, social media platform management, and the development of digital technologies remain under the control of profit-driven corporations, the obstacles to democracy will continue to proliferate. This trajectory would lead to demolishing democracy, hollowing it of its substance, and eliminating any possibility for democratic transformation in countries still under authoritarian rule.
The Digital Age and Alternatives to Representative Democracy
There are undeniable contradictions between the nature of digital age tools and the prevailing implementation model of democracy. Eliminating the various negative effects currently amplified by the dominant business model of social media platforms will not, in any case, lead to the disappearance of these contradictions.
The expansion of the right to freedom of expression through social media platforms has granted citizens’ voices significant and direct influence over the course of public affairs. In many cases, state institutions find themselves either obliged or perhaps compelled to respond to the positions expressed by the majority of users on these platforms regarding certain issues, or choose not to respond and bear the consequences.
And in reality, this tends to weaken these institutions over time. It either makes them less influential or brands them as unresponsive to the popular will. Generally speaking, considering the voice of the people through social media platforms as a direct and sincere expression of popular will calls into question the effectiveness of representative or parliamentary democracy.
On the other hand, the system of representative democracy is more vulnerable to phenomena such as misinformation, fake news, and the deliberate manipulation of public opinion. One of the main reasons for this vulnerability is that representative democracy relies primarily on electoral milestones. These milestones represent critical points of contact—opportunities to intensify the effects of the obstacles to democracy, thereby influencing the outcomes of the electoral process. Additionally, electoral battles create pressure to focus on the most sensational issues rather than those with the greatest impact on people’s lives.
What has been said by no means implies that social media platforms, in their current form (regardless of the business model behind their management), can serve as a substitute for representative bodies. Nor does it mean that these platforms accurately and truthfully reflect the popular will. However, they may inspire new ideas about what democratic practice could look like in a digital world.
It also serves as a reminder that representative democracy is merely one form of democratic practice. This form was adopted not because it most accurately represented the popular will, but because it was the most feasible model under the prevailing technological conditions from the late eighteenth century until recently. Today, however, those conditions have changed radically, and digital technology now offers possibilities unlike any previous model the world has known.
The capabilities of digital technology can be harnessed to reform the system of democratic practice in a way that gradually approaches the model of direct democracy. In this model, citizens have the right to vote on legislative and executive political decisions that directly affect their lives.
The current technology makes implementing such a model practically feasible in some countries. It also provides the necessary tools to ensure the integrity and credibility of voting processes. Pursuing such a path would represent a radical shift from the current situation: instead of digital technology being a source of existential threats to democracy, it would become a driving force for developing democracy and enhancing its ability to reflect the people’s will more broadly.
Conclusion
If the questions were posed: Are social media platforms a boon or bane for democracy? The simple answer would be that they can be either. To clarify, the positive or negative impact of social media on democracy depends on two key factors: the way social media platforms are managed and how the Internet is governed on one hand, and the nature of democratic practice on the other.
Suppose we restrict our answer to present realities. In that case, social media platforms currently represent a source of multiple significant challenges, and of one or more existential threats to democracy and its future. What is required to change this remains, for now, mainly within the realm of ambitious -perhaps even radical- visions. Yet, it remains possible, provided sufficient political will exists to make it happen.
This paper has presented an approach to understanding the relationship between social media platforms and democracy. The first section examined the concept of democracy and the essential rights required for it to flourish, followed by a discussion of the intersection between social media platforms and democracy.
The paper also addressed three phenomena related to social media platforms that represent obstacles to democracy. Additionally, it proposed approaches that could transform digital technology into a fundamental factor for revitalizing democracy in a new form. One that harnesses the tools of this technology to fulfill its promise of enabling citizens to participate in the management of public affairs genuinely.