Informal Democratic Equality: Four Ideals (And Why Social Media May Undermine Them)

Social media sites pose a challenge to the working of democratic deliberation. And they challenge democratic theorists to work out the normative significance of social networks. The most important diagnosis, I maintain, is that structural properties of social media undermine normatively attractive features of the public sphere. Social network sites change the topology of the political communication networks in ways that are largely non-transparent and beyond the control of citizens. Consumers of traditional mass media used to rely on the assumption that their fellow citizens receive roughly the same information as they do and that citizens know about each other’s involvement in the public sphere. By contrast, due to individualized targeting in social networks, users have very little sense whether they share a similar information basis with their fellow citizens. This a problem because the way we structure the communication that ultimately leads to votes and consequential political decisions will influence (i) how much substantial influence citizens have over the decisions of their community; (ii) how informed and how well-informed different citizens are; and (iii) whether citizens believe that the deliberative processes leading up to votes are organized such that all citizens are treated and relate as equals. To substantiate these claims, I first develop a simple model of the public sphere, show that a normatively attractive feature of the public sphere is common (or at least public) knowledge of the existing communication network, and argue that the largely private structure of new communication networks inhibits the functioning of the public sphere. I will then propose four ideals of informal democratic equality that will help to advance the normative debate: (i) The equal opportunity of influence ideal. It suggests that citizens can, if they effectively use the tools at their disposal, have equal or at least roughly similar influence on public decision making. (ii) The public equality ideal. It demands that the equal position of citizens is publicly observable and not hidden behind opaque network structures. (iii) The equal voice ideal. This ideal is about guaranteeing equal informal representation in the public sphere, especially the guarantee that one’s (reasonable) political arguments are heard by a perceptive public audience and that different arguments are treated impartially. (iv) The autonomy ideal. This ideal demands that voters can effectively free themselves from manipulation and have resources available to form their own political judgements. These four ideals will then be used to assess the influence of social networking sites on democratic decision making.