Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies to Congress about the use of Facebook data in the 2016 election.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Images (Mark Zuckerberg)

Is Social Media Good for Democracy?

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, have revolutionized how we communicate. Facebook has 2.3 billion users worldwide, Instagram has 1 billion, and Twitter has 326 million. In the past few years, these platforms have been enormously influential in getting Americans to debate the issues facing the nation. While many applaud social media’s ability to reach ordinary people, critics point to Russia’s manipulation of social media during the 2016 election as one reason to be concerned.

So is social media good for democracy? A scholar of the internet and a longtime technology entrepreneur face off.

April 22, 2019

The early hope for the internet was that it would improve democracy not only by giving people far more access to information but also by enabling people to connect with one another directly, and speak in their own voices about what matters to them. Social media has indeed done all that.

Before social media, the information you could get about a candidate or political issue depended on what the news media and the politicians chose to say. If you wanted to do a “deep dive” on something that mattered particularly to you, you were probably out of luck. If you had questions about your chosen issue, there was likely no one you could ask. But now social media makes it easy. You can share what you dig up on the internet, ask questions, propose answers, and talk with others to explore what’s going on and what it means.

Before social media, if you wanted to be involved in politics, there were few opportunities for regular folks to give input on a campaign. Virtually all the communication would be one-way: The campaign would come up with brief “messages” that reduced complex issues to a few words—“an economy that works for everyone” or “freeing business to succeed!”—and there would be no practical way for you to communicate your ideas up the chain of command to the candidate. Now with social media, we get to speak, not with the candidate directly, but to the campaign staff since they monitor commentary on social media.

Social media has made people more connected and more engaged.

Beyond that, thanks to social media, powerful political movements have arisen that have had real effects. For example, rather than relying on a complicated political organization, the #MeToo movement formed around a simple hashtag, as women posted personal stories of sexual harassment on social media. Without any formal organization or leaders, this movement has been successful in exposing wrongdoing and changing attitudes.

More engagement, more conversations, and more equality of participation—these are all ways social media, for all its faults and dangers, has created a more democratic world.

—DAVID WEINBERGER

Senior Researcher, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Univ.

If social media were good for democracy, it would have deterred the global rise of authoritarianism that we’ve seen in the past decade. It didn’t. In fact, social media has eroded democratic institutions around the world.

The defining feature of democracy is the guarantee of free and fair elections. In the past few years, we’ve repeatedly seen social media used to undermine elections—both abroad and in the U.S.

In 2016, Russia used social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Using fake accounts that automatically shared disinformation, a foreign country was able to sow division, sway opinions of some American voters, and persuade others to stay away from the polls.

Beyond outright manipulation of elections, the very design of social media subverts the kinds of meaningful debates among citizens that a functioning democracy requires. Because social media platforms depend on advertising to make money, they’re designed to manipulate users’ attention. They use psychological tricks—appealing to emotions like fear and anger, for example—to keep us engaged. But that doesn’t encourage the sustained deliberations that we need in public life.

Social media doesn’t encourage the sustained debates democracy requires.

Social media is designed to learn how users think and to show them more information that they’ll like. Instead of having a shared reality in which people of different opinions can agree on a shared set of facts, we each have our own reality, created by an algorithm’s prediction about what we want to see. This tends to make our opinions more rigid and extreme, and it makes compromise—the lifeblood of a democracy—all but impossible.

In every country in which they operate, social media platforms now dominate the public debate; they are where people have conversations about the issues of the day. Despite this political power, they operate virtually free of regulation. They are not good for democracy.

—ROGER McNAMEE