Sander, Antoine, Social Media, Democracy, and the Popular Public Sphere (2025). Constellations 32(2): 330–342.
Abstract
In April 2022, Barack Obama was invited by Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center to deliver a keynote address on the “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm.” The former US president made the trip to the “heart of the Silicon Valley,” as he put it, to issue a stern warning: social media are “one of the biggest reasons for democracies weakening” (Obama 2022). Coming from someone widely recognized to have employed digital technology to great effect in his presidential campaigns (Cogburn and Espinoza-Vasquez 2011; Harfoush 2009), this statement echoes a broader disenchantment with the Internet’s democratic promises. Gone are the days when the Web was seen as a panacea to democratic deficit. Only a decade ago, social and political theorists predicted that new, networked, communicative processes would improve collective decision-making, challenge the top-down logic of mass media, and provide activists with means to resist excessive state authority (Castells 2013; Shirky 2009). Today, social media are most often associated with misinformation, the rise of populism, polarization, and democratic decay (Bimber and Gil de Zúñiga 2020; Boulianne et al. 2020; McKay and Tenove 2021; Sunstein 2018).
Underlying these debates is the question of digital technology’s impact on politics.