Early pronouncements about the leveling power of the internetâas a means of publication, as a site of rational deliberationâhave more recently given way to debates over the effect of social media on democratic uprisings (Tufekci, 2017; Vaidhyanathan, 2018) or the impact of slacktivism on democratic participation (Christensen, 2011; Vie, 2014). There is now little doubt that digital media can affect democratic processes. Brexit, the Aadhaar Act in India, and the 2016 US elections have all underscored how the democratizing potential of social media is counterbalanced by a prominent array of actors utilizing hate speech, state-sponsored propaganda, and misinformation to achieve anti-democratic goals. While there have always been voices of caution and restraint regarding the promise and dangers of digital networks, in the years since the Arab Spring the pendulum of debate has swung to focus on the dangers of online media to democracy.
As the reach and robustness of digital networks has increased, it has become clear that many platforms are struggling to balance the openness necessary for deliberation and freedom of communication with the need to protect citizen speech from the disruptive behavior of aggressive online mobs, authoritarian governments, and misinformation from a host of sources (cf. Coleman, 2018; Tufekci, 2017). Recent events have demonstrated the precarity of digitally based democratic movements, revealing social mediaâs vulnerability to manipulation as well as the limits of both governmental oversight and the wisdom of crowds to police this manipulation and its impact on the public sphere. The privileging of attentionâlikes, engagement, clicksâover democratic ideals such as accuracy and rationality appears to have stunted the civic ethos once envisioned as a primary product of digital culture (cf. Coleman, Moss, Parry, & Blumler, 2015; Gillespie, 2010), and this has called into question the presumption that the web is an efficient market of ideas, able to drown out misinformation and propaganda with rational discourse. Similarly, strategies for digital governance (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013; Welchman, 2015), the flow of information across digital spaces (Ridolfo & DeVoss, 2017), and value-based argumentation (N. N. Jones, 2016) that were understood as cornerstones of civic participation online (Benkler, 2006), have been undermined or repurposed as tools of disruption and cultural antagonism (Massanari, 2017). If the digital revolution has arrived, that revolution has not been as open or democratic as we were promised.
We are living, then, in a time marked by the evolution of social mediaâs relationship to democracy and governance, and it remains to be seen whether digital media will serve to disrupt democracy, spread it, or serve some role in between. Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy explores this evolution and the future of networked democracy in chapters that address social mediaâs impact on the public sphere, the role of misinformation in online spaces, and the challenges facing individuals, collectives, and governments as they work within and in response to this environment. The authors gathered here examine how digital platforms influence democratic deliberation across multiple cultures and nations, considering online moderation, governance, and activism in the aftermath of recent anti-democratic manipulation and interference. In doing so, the collection demonstrates how emerging digital methods and communication theory are integral to addressing the challenges introduced by disruptive events from across the globe.
Networked Democracy
Networked democracy is shaped in response to networked propaganda and misinformation as well as the specific challenges posed by networked effects to traditional concepts of deliberative democracy. To establish a baseline for traditional deliberative democracy, we draw upon Blumler and Colemanâs (2015) five guidelines for effective communication in democracies, broadly summarized below:
- 1.Allow accessible and reliable surveillance of the governmental apparatus to citizens.
- 2.Allow citizens a âmeaningfulâ choice as a norm of democratic process.
- 3.Allow access to all affected stakeholders to participate in the process.
- 4.Allow those who hold âsignificant power in the political processâ to be held to account for that power.
- 5.Allow citizens a method to âmeaningfullyâ understand the decision-making process and communicate with those in power.
The affordances and scale available to global networks of activists engaging their own governments and institutions as well as foreign governments and institutions have created new tensions around accountability, transparency, and representation. For example, digital networks bring together collections of stakeholders with agendas and interests that compete at the local, national, and global levels, stressing traditional mechanisms of accountability by mixing and matching citizen stakeholders with a variety of institutions (media, economic, political, and activist) beyond the national. Thus, institutions in China affect citizen interests in the United States as movements like #MeToo move from the United States to China. The ease of digital networking enables governments and citizens to form non-traditional alliances that can preclude the deliberative, communicative engagementâthe offering of viable choices to all stakeholdersâof traditional democracy, even as anonymity in spaces like Twitter and 4chan can elide transparency for both citizens and institutions. Digital activism can now originate from domestic citizens or foreign non-citizens, contain both information and disinformation promoted by any of these actors, and all these media exist within the same networks, a situation that challenges structures founded on equal representation. At the same time, key stakeholders might be excluded from key conversations by not being on the right platform at the right time.
Responding to these tensions, networked democracy must prioritize meaningful engagement while remaining accountable, accessible, and transparent to stakeholders, even as what it means to be a stakeholder grows increasingly complicated within digital networks. Unlike networked disinformation or propagandaâwhere propaganda is a message from the state to the people that serves state power, and misinformation is counterfactual information provided by state or non-state actors to undermine or confuse networked discourse (Tufekci, 2017)ânetworked democracy seeks the means to sufficiently stabilize facts and values to reach effective policy outcomes for a population by offering policy choices that are accessible, meaningful, and transparent. It is, at heart, a rhetorical act of closing stases, both social and political, by the consensus of the governed. Unfortunately, such stases can be closed via networked propaganda or misinformation as well. The current prominence (in public discourse) of networked misinformation and propaganda has become a device to undermine deliberative values, as actors promoting disinformation move within transnational digital networks. This collection is concerned with how networks enable power and its exercise in online spaces at the local, national, and global level, simultaneously examining the rhetorical and functional capabilities of networked political communication. Although this collection does not resolve the challenges to networked democracy, it offers numerous methods, theories, and cases from across the globe that can serve as a blueprint for democratic responses to these phenomena.
A Brief History of Networked Democracy
At the turn of the twenty-first century, digital democracy remained heavily speculative. In the pre-Web 2.0 world, it was difficult to imagine that the internet could bypass the power of broadcast and cable television (Jenkins, Thorburn, & Seawell, 2004). Yet, the rising power of networked and global communities (Castells, 2009; Meyrowitz, 1986) raised significant concerns about tensions between the global and the local that would connect many of the issues related to digital democracy over the following two decades. It has become clear that digital technologies have altered collective action, most notably by lessening the importance of common identification among members of groups (Bennett & Segerberg, 2013). Despite the belief that âorganization-less organizingâ would outperform traditional hierarchies and collectives, these groups have adapted to this new networked reality by moving beyond traditional membership to provide more avenues for individuals to connect with the group (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2012; Staiou & Gouscos, 2014).
Such changes, however, apply equally to democratic and anti-democratic organization. As far back as 2004 Jenkins and Thorburn (Jenkins et al., 2004) understood that digital media and the internet had given renewed life to radicalism across the spectrum even as they underestimated the potential impact of this change. It would take a decade for digital networks to demonstrate their efficiency in connecting isolated radicals to larger communities and for this to make its mark on wider culture, increasing the effectiveness and appeal of far-right and far-left populism, terrorist recruiting, and a host of emergent, disruptive subcultures. Paradoxically, digital networks have been able to undermine and challenge authoritarian regimes and their mechanisms of power even while providing new avenues for totalitarian and anti-democratic propaganda and control.
Web 2.0
The first decade of the twenty-first century offered a tale of initial success in digital, global collaboration. From Wikipedia to torrents to social media, Web 2.0 promised to be an enormous boon to public deliberation and thus lead to more responsive institutions. Though partisan radicalism was already a significant concern (Castells, 2009; Jenkins et al., 2004), the promise of self-organization, such as in Wikiped...