‘I like democracy’ – proclaimed a meme which had been circulating on social media for a couple of months after the 2016 US presidential election but is now near impossible to find – ‘provided that my candidate wins’. Squeezed between the two lines of text was a picture of a group of people holding various banners with the then-famous slogan ‘#notmypresident’.
The meme might be stupid – and even paradoxical taking into account the 2021 Capitol attacks – but works well in expressing a general sentiment that relates to democracy and social media. Something is happening – very few people would say that the emergence and growth of various social networks did not have a negative impact on the health of many contemporary democracies. Yet what exactly is happening is still not clear – the majority of current explanations attempt to criticize a particular societal faction, blaming it for all evils, rather than to look for some general, overarching mechanisms. For progressives, the problem is the right-wing echo chambers and the unwillingness of social media giants to tackle them. For hardcore conservatives, it is the fight against hate speech and self-imposed censorship prevalent in traditional social networks. In this article, I want to propose an alternative way of looking into democracy and its relationship with social media. I am not claiming to have found an ultimate explanation; this alternative view, based on the partly reimagined conception of democracy is best seen as one of many angles from which the complicated relationship between social media and the health of democracy can be analyzed.
In its traditional sense, democracy is most often seen as a device to aggregate individual preferences into collective ones, with a vast array of possible interpretations on how precisely this aggregation should work. In a typical analysis of the impact of social media on democratic structures, democracy is treated in a largely ‘positive’ sense: who is elected to rule, not who is prevented from doing so; which laws are passed instead of which are not; what are societal factors which gain influence, not what are the ones who lose it.
But maybe – and this is a question asked by philosopher Karl Popper in his book Open Society and Its Enemies – we should be looking the other way around? For Popper, democracy represented a fundamental shift in the thought of political philosophy. Instead of fruitlessly trying to answer the age-old question of ‘who should rule?’ – the wisest, the best, the kindest, the expression of the general will, the unjustly oppressed and the most numerous class – democracy changes the question itself. Given that we find it very difficult to find the best, the wisest or the kindest, the thing we should care about is not who should be rulers but how can we ensure that rulers we already have are tamed and prevented from doing too much damage.
Under this framework, democracy is, first and foremost, about the mechanism of change and limited uncertainty – in every functioning democratic state there is a possibility to change the actors performing functions of governance, and this change is tightly regulated, peaceful and regularly occurring. The focus is, then, on replacement and not on the election of leaders: democracy is not about the collective agreement of societal factions to come up with a consensus that will satisfy all parties – an aim far too unrealistic – but about the acknowledgement that, for a limited period of time, one or another view will be given a priority and such a priority will be regularly tested with a realistic possibility for it to be replaced by contesting views.
This alternative framework of democracy need not be indisputably correct or universally accepted and may contain a couple of contestable assumptions. But it allows us to quite clearly see how the emergence of social media has contributed to the problems democracy is facing. The key connection here is a special type of fallibilism – the notion that one’s views regarding the organization of a society cannot be proved to be certain or undisputable.
This fallibilism, or more precisely the widespread perception of it amongst the members of a society, especially those who are active in the political sphere, is crucial to the successful functioning of democracy under the alternative framework. For democracy – a system of change and constrained uncertainty – to work, societal factions cannot be 100% certain about the justness, truthfulness and indisputableness of their views. In other words, societal factions have to think of themselves as fallible. This may at first sound counterintuitive but can be made clearer by the use of a counterfactual: if societal factions were 100% certain about their views, the precedent of elections and the existence of democracy could never be justified. If one thinks that there is a single, clear and right answer to how human societies should be organized, participation in and organization of elections is not only unnecessary but also plainly indefensible –- elections are events characterized by high to moderate uncertainty with the possibility that the opposing view (the one which under this scenario is clearly, indisputably wrong) might take over. But if there is even the tiniest bit of doubt that one may be wrong and other groups, parties or factions may be right, democracy becomes viable.
This perception of fallibilism need not be (and is often not) explicit – members of the political community may well think that their views regarding the organization of society are clearly superior to those of the others and will engage in political competition to make sure that these views are translated into reality. But in healthy democracies, the majority of them, when pressed with questions like ‘why is there a system of contestable elections in place, if other opinions are wrong or inferior?’ would likely end up with a position that emphasizes the importance of consensus, discussion and the fact that human beings are, individually and collectively, fallible.
This special type of fallibilism is important. As Popper puts it, with the perception of fallibilism present in the society “acceptance of even a bad policy in a democracy, as long as we can work for a peaceful change, is preferable to the submission of tyranny, however wise or benevolent”. Fallibilism generates democratic consent – momentary winners agree not to use their superiority to prevent the losers from contesting them in the future, and temporary losers agree to respect the superiority of winners’ decisions – and facilitates discussions, negotiations and consensus-making. While there is something about which we are even the tiniest bit uncertain, there is something about which we can try to agree and compromise.
The great problem is that the societal perception of fallibilism is neither natural, nor guaranteed. The exercise of always having a fallibilist red flag in the corner of one’s mind is not an easy one. Graham Swift notices a tendency of human beings, throughout the course of history, to fall for ‘shortcuts to Salvation and recipes for the New World.’ Ditching the perception of fallibilism and falling for some idea which claims to be able to clearly, indisputably explain the world and draw the vision for the future is easy and comforting. Resisting it and reminding oneself of one’s inevitable fallibility is hard and requires commitment.
The perception of fallibilism must be sustained by active efforts of politicians, activists and citizens: they have to avoid the allure of ditching the fallibilist mindset and engaging in scorched earth tactics of portraying their views as indisputable and those of their opponents as illegitimate. But when a significant portion of political life transfers to the realms of social media, this task becomes increasingly difficult. Bit by bit, the perception crumbles and withers away. There are three stages with the help of which social media leads to the disintegration of fallibilism.
First comes the vulgarization of information. The length of written and visual material using which political positions can be expressed in social media is severely limited. In some cases this is done by the social network itself, as it is the case with Twitter, in some others it is enforced by the type of information shared, as in Instagram, in yet others, such as Facebook, it is our short attention spans which do the job. The shorter the text in which the position is being expressed, the more nuances it has to omit, the less of the relevant context it can add and the more authoritative it sounds.
In their piece which appeared in the Atlantic in 2019, Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell refer to the phrase pro- posed by philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke: ‘moral grandstanding.’ It refers to a variety of tactics that can be seen as part of the wider vulgarization tendency: exaggerate emotional displays, public shaming, and short, concise pieces of opinion filled with accusations and unbacked claims. These tactics are not new: emotion-based persuasion was flourishing well before the emergence of digital technologies.
The problem is that vulgarized content in social media is more persuasive and more prevalent. A combination of these two factors means that for a significant portion of the population vulgarized information becomes the only source of information. In the environment where the majority of political opinions are vulgar, emotion-based and deprived of context, nuances or variability, a dangerous illusion can quickly form: everything – from moral issues related to abortion to collisions between individual and group identity – is easily explainable; in fact, many may believe that everything has already been explained and discussions are only a waste of time.
Second comes the enforcement of existing beliefs. The vulgarization of information would be unfortunate, but not a tragic development if one would be exposed to a variety of vulgar- ized, but still different opinions.
However, this is not how social media works. Its algorithms are designed to provide us, the users, with content we are likely to engage with and which we are likely to enjoy. It is a known human psychological fact that very few of us enjoy being confronted with views that do not align with our own. We may (or may not) acknowledge that this confrontation is important, or even necessary for the formation of justified opinions, but still do nothing to diversify our social media feeds. As a consequence, individuals find themselves engaging only with the content and information generated by people, politicians or even companies with beliefs similar or even identical to those of their own. The decline of fallibilism begins precisely at that moment when we stop directly witnessing opinions and statements with which we disagree. If there is no one to disagree with, it means that dogmatic truths can be established within separate societal factions, bubbles or echo chambers. In real life, one has to put an at least active effort to distance oneself from disagreeing views – it is impossible to just shut one’s ears to them. In the realms of social media, shutting one’s ears is not even an active choice: the engagement-maximizing nature of social media’s algorithms does that for us.
The third stage relates to the death of discussion. Political opinions may become vulgar, bubbles may form and enforce themselves, but one may still think that there is an option
of collision, some form of in- ter-bubble discussion which can help us witness the existence of differences and save the perception of fallibilism from death. However, this view fails to capture the differences between opinion collisions in social media and real life. Inter-bubble collisions do happen but instead of promoting fallibilism, they enforce the existing beliefs and confirm the views about the other bubble formed before the collision.
Comment sections in social media platforms are designed more for the expression of opinions and statements rather than a reoccurring exchange between two different parties. Substitution of real-life interactions with dehumanizing written exchanges does not help either. Discussion in its original form becomes non-existent, as different bubbles of opinions do not consider their counterparts as valid or legitimate and as the exchange of views – when one’s opinion is updated or at least challenged by another opinion – does not happen. Those who participate in these collisions leave not with the reinforced notion of fallibilism, but with confirmation that their opponents are just as ignorant, missguided and downright wrong as they thought before. Perception of fallibilism is not strengthened, but rather further wounded.
In his monumental work Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky gives a description of a dream Raskolnikov has while battling a fever in a prison’s hospital. Dostoevsky writes about a strange new plague, a disease which affects not bodies but rather minds of people: “Never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible.” He writes about people who ‘each thought that he alone had the truth’ and about confusion spreading in the world: “they did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify.”
In some strange and utterly disturbing sense, Dostoevsky’s descriptions of imaginary plague closely resemble the sentiment which is more and more often prevalent in the realms of contemporary social media. I am not claiming that there is a complete overlap – these days, it is more often the large, dichotomic factions that play the role Dostoevsky ascribed to individual people. However, certain parallels cannot be overlooked.
The notion of being completely in possession of truth is spreading and affects all parts of the political spectrum – from the far right to the illiberal left. Societal fragmentation is on the rise – urban versus rural, young versus old, conservative versus liberal – and the democratic consensus is fracturing. In some countries, the very existence of a democratic form of governance is under threat of authoritarianism-sympathizing populist leaders.
It might be the case that very little can be done to reverse this trend – the long-term collective losses experienced by democracy as a system are compensated by short-term individual gains experienced by political parties and social movements. In the political world which is more and more dominated by social media, preventing individual actors from exploiting the gains obtainable after ditching the fallibilist mindset is, in my view, an impossible task. Fallibilism and democracy will not likely experience a sudden and devastating collapse.
Effects of slow deterioration may take long to become clearly visible, precisely because in most cases the fallibilistic mind- set is not explicit. But if social media continues to function the way it functions now, certain questions will arise more and more often. Why cooperate if others, due to their indisputably false beliefs, are impossible to cooperate with? Why discuss if there is nothing left to be discussed, given that truths – one for each competing faction – have already been discovered? Why engage in an expensive, time-consuming and uncertain game of democracy, if the probability that a competing faction could be right is zero? And it might be the case that if a sufficient number of people find these questions unanswerable, democracy, instead of being appreciated and valued, will become merely tolerated – and tolerated only so long as one’s candidate continues to win.
Justas Petrauskas is a first year Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) student at Oriel College, University of Oxford.