SoMe4Dem

INTRODUCTION

“Social media play an ever-increasing role in public discourse and are now a significant part of the media ecosystem, a development that has structurally changed the public sphere. Some scholars describe these changes as a ‘media revolution’ comparable to the invention of printing press or the advent of radio and TV. Social media initially inspired utopias of a new type of direct democracy and immediate participation (e.g., as a  ‘liberation technology’ in the context o the  ‘Arab spring’). Two decades later, discourse about social media  is marked by more dystopian narratives of societies losing social coherence by increasing fragmentation and polarization. Moreover, social media have been blamed for the increased vulnerability of the public in many democracies to misinformation and disinformation. Currently, the literature seems to be moving beyond a simplistic dualism where social media is either good or bad. Instead, the impact of digital media on political behaviour and attitudes is found to be multi-faceted and dependent on the specific dimension of the political outcome and its context.”

The SoMe4Dem project proposes to take the diagnosis  that social media have structurally changed the public sphere seriously, and seeks to develop solutions that help make social media work for democracy rather than against it.

We have asked Trisha ‘What the project is about’ and ‘Why it is so important’.

What is it about?

Rapid and far -reaching developments in the information sphere- social media, digital news media- are leading to profound changes in how individuals communicate, organize and express themselves. These new modes of communication have been shown to have two diametrically opposing consequences, thus giving rise to a fundamental paradox of the Internet and social media:

“They erode democracy and they expand democracy. They are the tools of autocrats and they are the tools of activists. They make people obey and they make them protest. They provide a voice to the marginalized and they give reach to fanatics and extremists.”

This project aims to tackle this paradox by forging significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the societal effects of social media and by proposing new transformations of social media to tackle the pressing issues facing our society.

Why is it important?

Our approach is driven by the recognition that one cannot simply return to the pre-social media era by re-establishing strong gate-keeping institutions without endangering essential features of the liberal democracy itself.  In the SoMe4Dem project the consortium wants to explore solutions that are informed by three strands of research:

(1) connecting the study of social media to theory of democracy;

(2) investigating the causal mechanisms underlying the impact of social media on the public sphere;

(3) proposing interventions that respect the autonomy of users and empower them as informed digital citizens.

The project will address 2 case studies focussing on specific new practices emerging around social media: new participatory practices in crowd-sourcing for political campaigns and online petitions and the Open Source Intelligence community-a new combination of citizen journalism and crowd-sourced fact checking-as an example of ‘new forms of citizenship online’ beyond national and political divides.

Abstract

Current diagnoses that democracy is in crisis at the beginning of the 21st century share a common argumentative reference point: the (implicit) reference to the dysfunctional constitution of the political public sphere which is currently undergoing structural change. The rise of social media platforms is considered as one of its main constituents. While social media make the public arena more open and thus more responsive, these platforms also lead to new mechanisms of fragmentation and exclusion, an erosion of norms in public debate and a loss of trust in traditional institutions.

The project will reconsider the diagnoses of this crisis by:

(1) providing better empirical evidence for the impact of social media on society with respect to political debates,

(2) understanding the main causal mechanisms of this impact and

(3) developing tools that improve the capacity of social media to contribute to the functioning of the public arena in a liberal democracy, i.e., deliberation, legitimation and the self-perception of the democratic subject.

Role of VUB - In-house expertise on ‘disinformation’ @ VUB

Prof.  Meyer, is the director of the VUB Research Centre on Digitalisation, Democracy and Innovation at the Brussels School of Governance (BSoG). She researches the regulatory push toward and societal consequences of tech platforms taking proactive (automated) measures to moderate online content, with a focus on disinformation.