Popular, Accessible, Inclusive: Social Media as an Ideal for Decision-making in a Democracy

Restrictions to participation attract skepticism to ordinary citizens’ capacity to be engaged in the political decision-making process in a democratic society. Social media platforms address these skepticisms by outlining features of social media that facilitate discourses, quality civic engagement, and responsibility, necessary in preserving democratic ideals and practice in society. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, including algorithms and artificial intelligence, are regarded as better media to be trusted with political decision-making as they remove constraints of bias, accessibility, discrimination, and power imbalances usually found in precarious settings like face-to-face deliberations and of political representations. Employing analysis of secondary data from peer-reviewed journals and dissertations enabled us to harvest insights needed to substantiate the arguments and conclusions made in this article. This paper demonstrates the arguments for the ubiquity of social media as an ideal for the decision-making process in a democratic space. However, the presence of impediments as provided for by the social media platforms and governments including censorship, regulation, and legitimacy must be recognized for the merit it attaches to quality deliberations through social media. Using the normative ideals of inclusivity and epistemic value of participation, social media indeed is an ideal for decision-making particularly when the conditions under which the biases are developed and explained are held. In the end, accepting social media as an ideal to decision-making in democracy should not be accepted as is, unless theorization of the role of social media and justification of its merits is made. Without such, we may fail to account for what we seek in social media to support democracy.