Digital Threats to Democracy Intro Lupin.pdf (270.27 kB)
Digital threats to democracy: comparative lessons and possible remedies
journal contribution
posted on 2020-05-26, 15:27 authored by Michael L. Miller, Cristian VaccariWe introduce a special issue that collects eight articles, comprising research from twenty-three countries and four continents on the sources, impact on citizens, and possible remedies to various digital threats to democracy, ranging from disinformation to hate speech to state interference with online freedoms. We set these contributions against the backdrop of a profound change in how scholars think about the implications of digital media for democracy. From the utopianism that prevailed from the 1990s until the early 2010s, the post-2016 reckoning has led to a change in the kinds of questions scholars ask, with the focus gradually shifting to investigations of the threats, rather than the benefits, of the Internet. The eight contributions presented in this special issue employ a variety of disciplinary approaches and methods, often comparing different countries, to address some of the most pressing questions on how the Internet can hinder the feasibility and well-functioning of democracy around the world. We conclude by setting out three challenges for future research on digital media and politics: a growing but still partial understanding of the extent and impact of the main digital threats to democracy; the risk that the dominant approaches become overly pessimistic, or founded on weak normative grounds; and the risk that research overemphasizes direct and short-term implications of digital threats on individuals and specific groups at the expense of indirect and medium-term effects on collective norms and expectations of behavior.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
The International Journal of Press/PoliticsVolume
25Issue
3Pages
333 - 356Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal The International Journal of Press/Politics and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161220922323. Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference.Publication date
2020-05-11Copyright date
2020ISSN
1940-1612eISSN
1940-1620Publisher version
Language
- en
Depositor
Prof Cristian Vaccari. Deposit date: 26 May 2020Usage metrics
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