Digitalization and Deliberative Systems: Rethinking the Feedback Loop Model of Democracy

As social media have various disruptive effects on the opinion and will formation of democratic societies (e.g. misinformation, fragmentation, commodification, domination), a rapidly growing literature in political theory presents ideas for their restructuring – with models ranging from private self-regulation to platform socialism. I argue that these proposals put the cart before the horse. To be able to say what kind of social media would be desirable, one first needs to determine their democratic function – which is far from obvious. Drawing on Habermas’s two-track model of deliberative democracy, I show that the platforms have a plurality of (actualized) democratic affordances, which cannot be optimized all at once. In determining the proper place of social media in democracy, and thus their desirable form, we need to avoid two kinds of shortcuts: first, to simply deduce the expected function of social media from a normative theory of democracy; second, to simply affirm the (superficially) democratic roles that social media de facto play at present. I argue that the way forward for democratic theory is to rationally reconstruct the performative meaning of political communication and action on social media, starting from the self-understanding of citizens operating as users of these platforms.