Digital Media and Democratic Futures

Introduction: Digital Media and the Future(s) of Democracy

Michael X. Delli Carpini

On January 27, 2017 newly elected U.S. president Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13769, placing limits on the number of refugees admitted into the United States, suspending entry of aliens from seven predominantly Muslim nations, and indefinitely barring Syrian refugees from entering the country. Within minutes of its announcement, individuals and groups opposed to what was being called a Muslim ban took to social media, resulting in large and spontaneous demonstrations at airports and in cities around the globe. In the days that followed, President Trump defended his decision and criticized those challenging it through a series of late-night tweets, while White House representatives scrambled to explain the chaotically implemented policy on more traditional news outlets. Numerous legal challenges resulted in a federal district judge issuing a temporary restraining order on major parts of the executive order, a ruling unanimously upheld two days later by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The furor over immigration was only one of numerous conflicts during the first several weeks of Trump’s presidency. Some involved seemingly trivial matters such as the size of the crowd and the weather at his inauguration, the decision by the Nordstrom department store chain to drop the clothing line produced by his daughter Ivanka’s company, and his biting reactions to the poor ratings of his Celebrity Apprentice replacement (Arnold Schwarzenegger). There were also more substantive issues such as unsubstantiated claims by the president that he lost the popular vote due to voter fraud; ethical and substantive concerns about his nominees to cabinet posts (which prompted the eventual resignation of his national security advisor); executive orders and actions regarding financial, environmental, ethics, health care, and immigration regulations; dueling accusations between the current and former presidents regarding campaign fraud related to Russian interference in the presidential election; and a drumbeat of attacks on the news media, which Trump and his chief strategist (Steve Bannon) labeled fake news and the enemy of the people. All were hotly debated and contested in the news, on talk shows, on the streets, and, most relevant to this volume, through social media.

Ideological and partisan disagreements are not new, and the more heightened and divisive variant that characterizes our current era predates the Trump presidency. Nonetheless, the extent to which the state of contemporary politics represents an existential threat to the theory and practice of constitutional democracy is more palpable than at any point since the Watergate era. Adding to this unease is the sense that verifiable facts and logical reasoning as the basis for political discourse and decision making are being replaced by an acceptance of alternative facts and a reliance on unfettered emotions. Equally concerning is that similar populist unravelings of democratic institutions and norms appear to be occurring across the globe.

The reasons for this unease and the events behind them are complex. Clearly, substantive issues such as growing economic inequality and insecurity, globalization, destabilization in the Middle East and the resulting European refugee crisis, and ongoing concerns over terrorism are playing a role. So too is the culmination of a steady increase in public distrust of the elite institutions of government, big business, and the media. But if real-world issues are the firewood of our current state, and public mistrust the kindling, the radically changed information environment brought about by social media and other forms of digital information and communications technologies (ICTs) are increasingly identified as the match that set fire to this combustible mix.

There is another side to this story, however. The digital revolution has also been seen as a potential boon to the practice of democracy in various, evolving forms. Examples abound: the 2008 Obama campaign’s use of ICTs to energize and mobilize new voters; the important role of social media in the early days of the Arab Spring, and as a catalyst for the Occupy Wall Street movement, both in 2011; the 2013 online campaign that led to the Black Lives Matter movement; the growing and more impactful role of citizen journalists as well as more random acts of journalism; the use of computational science methods, large data sets, and visualization technologies to create new forms of investigative journalism; the improvement of government services through the use of more interactive and responsive websites; and experiments in crowdsourcing to discuss and sometimes develop public policy. Indeed, even as critics raised concerns about the role of digital technologies in the 2016 presidential campaign and the early days of the Trump presidency, one must also note the democratic elements of not only Trump’s campaign (which gave voice to large swaths of the American public) but also that of Bernie Sanders, the unlikely challenger to Hillary Clinton. Digital technologies have been involved in spreading fake news and alternative facts but also in aiding efforts to counter them; in fueling concerns about the loss of privacy but also in providing citizens with more targeted, useful, and useable information precisely because of this loss; in creating echo chambers in which like-minded people talk only to themselves but also in allowing people to engage each other across temporal, geographic, political, and cultural boundaries (Delli Carpini 2018).

This tension between the democratic and undemocratic potentials of the digital media environment is not new, and interest in it is not limited to pundits and practitioners. The role of social media and other forms of digital ICTs in political development and disruption has been the subject of scholarly speculation and empirical research for decades. The authors of this body of work can be seen as initially falling into one of three camps: those who argued or found that the digital information environment had the potential to democratize politics in new and encouraging ways (e.g., Benkler 2006); those who argued or found that it represented a threat to well-functioning democracies (e.g., Sunstein 2001); and those who argued or found that it was essentially old wine in new bottles, with little chance of playing a significant new role in how politics fundamentally operated (e.g., Bimber and Davis 2003). As the new information environment evolved, as new examples emerged, and as our theorizing, data, and research methods expanded and improved, these initial camps have blurred; the central question has shifted (perhaps inevitably) from whether the digital information environment is good or bad for democratic politics to how and in what contexts specific attributes of this environment are having an influence on specific theories and practices of democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism (Williams and Delli Carpini 2011). It is only through the careful analysis of specific, contextualized examples that we can begin to build a more comprehensive understanding of digital media’s still evolving role in democratic theory and practice.

Emerging out of a yearlong set of workshops and a closing conference held at the University of Pennsylvania during the 2015–2016 academic year, this volume is an effort to provide some of these building blocks. Part I, Designing Digital Democracies, explores the crucial importance—for both scholars and practitioners—of understanding how the structure of digital ICTs can enhance or inhibit their effectiveness in achieving desired sociopolitical outcomes. In Chapter 1 Rena Bivens examines the ways in which nonprofit organizations (NPOs) use social media as a tool for achieving their goals. At the core of her argument is that the potential impact of social media is not simply or centrally in its use, but rather in the design of the social media platforms themselves, and that ultimately, Design decisions made by platform owners and computer programmers impact the everyday work of NPOs, and the values that motivate those design decisions become embedded in the technology itself. Focusing on antiviolence NPOs and their use of Facebook, Bivens unpacks these often invisible design decisions and how they, along with constraints introduced by what she calls the nonprofit industrial complex, shape the NPOs’ rules of engagement with their publics. She concludes that this combination severely limits the potential of social media to serve as a critical tool for social change. But she also notes that the embedded logics of mainstream social media platforms and of the mainstream nonprofit system are not immutable, but rather the result of design politics. This opens the door to the possibility of making more visible the politics underlying design decisions, of designing platforms that are more effectively oriented toward social justice, and thus of moving toward a material-discursive construction of social change work that refuses to be co-opted.

In Chapter 2 Daniel Kreiss provides what might be thought of as an example of how collective action can be designed with the very attributes Bivens points to in her conclusion. Focusing on Bernie Sanders’s surprising though ultimately unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Democratic Party’s nomination for president, Kreiss shows how his campaign was able to combine "symbolic resources from the civil sphere, Sanders’s unique position in a field of democratic candidates, and networks of campaign staffers with particular sets of skills, and technologies with particular affordances to digitally mobilize large numbers of (typically disengaged) supporters. This combination of spheres, fields, and networks, Kreiss argues, constitutes the digital opportunity structure that must be understood and exploited by any contemporary effort at collective political action. Further, he uses this case study to advance the sociological concept of ‘political opportunity structure’ more broadly, and to more systematically theorize and integrate what he argues are the foundational elements of social life: spheres of cultural meaning that are institutionally regulated, fields of relational symbolic and social activity, and networks of social and technological relations that cross, shape, and change both spheres and fields over time."

While using different language and focusing on yet a different dimension of democratic engagement, Chapter 3, authored by Thomas Elliott and Jennifer Earl, can be seen as a synthesis of Biven’s focus on platform design and Kreiss’s on digital opportunity structures. In this chapter Elliott and Earl examine both the supply and demand sides for young people’s online civic engagement. Their starting points are the general sense among many scholars and activists that today’s young people are not as engaged in or as integral to movements as they once were, and their own working premise that the reasons for this problem start not with young people themselves, but with the failure of social movements to reach out effectively to them. In short, the relative dearth of youth engagement in social movements is driven not by the demand side but by the supply side of the equation. To examine the supply side, Elliott and Earl use a unique and original database of systematically coded content from 363 carefully selected and arguably representative social movement web spaces that, combined, address twenty core sociopolitical issues and refer to over 1,400 specific protest actions. They then analyze this data by focusing on the presence or absence of three youth-facing design elements: content relevant to youth; efforts to specifically target or address young people; and describing, hosting, or linking to specific protest actions that explicitly encourage youth to participate. To examine the demand side, they draw on data from a nationally representative survey of 2,920 youth in which respondents were asked questions about their engagement with politics, online digital media, and civic and volunteer programs. The results of these analyses lead to several important conclusions: that youth are not as disengaged as some have worried; that this engagement is occurring despite a lack of significant targeting and tailoring by social movements in their online presences; that disengagement from particular types of protest activity may be due to a lack of opportunity for youth to participate; and that ultimately, young people’s levels of engagement could be even greater if movements more directly attempt to recruit and involve youth through the design of their web spaces.

While issues of design remain important to the three chapters in Part II, Rethinking Expertise in Digital Democracies, what ties them together is the ways in which the digital media environment can influence power relationships between political institutions, political elites, and citizens, altering our notions of knowledge producers and consumers. In Chapter 4 Beth Noveck makes the case for tapping into the collective intelligence of our communities, and drawing power from the participation of the many rather than the participation of the few through the development of participatory bureaucracy. Her reasons for this call are threefold. First, while the tension between democracy and professional expertise is not new, global public trust in the traditional institutions of government is at an all-time low, and responsible in part for the populist turns evidenced in events such as Brexit and the unexpected U.S. presidential election victory of Donald Trump. This mistrust, while often misplaced and exploited, is due at least in part to legitimate concerns about the limits of professional expertise and of the opaque, exclusionary, and often self-interested nature of the policy-making process. Second, Noveck argues that collectively, the public possesses extraordinary know-how, skills, experience, and passions . . . to participate in solving problems, and that this citizen expertise is widely distributed in society and if tapped, can be of great value to the policy-making process. And third, she argues that the current digital environment provides new opportunities for increasing public expertise, identifying these public experts, and allowing more members of the public to participate actively in problem solving and governing through various forms of smarter crowdsourcing. Bolstering her arguments with a range of case studies, Noveck both demonstrates the democratic potential of technology in the service of tapping public expertise and provides a roadmap for how this potential might be better integrated into democratic institutions in the future.

Crowdsourcing also plays a prominent role in Kelly Gates’s Chapter 5, though in this case it is used not by government institutions but by journalistic ones. The backdrop for Gates’s analysis is the emergence of police killings of unarmed black men as a political issue, sparked in part by the killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014. Gates notes the importance of mobile cameras (used by both citizens and police forces) in this debate, but her central focus is on the absence of official data on police killings, the resulting difficulty in comparing the visual record with hard data on the prevalence of such shootings, and the attempt on the part of journalists and other concerned actors to resolve the problem of missing data through online crowdsourcing initiatives. She then provides a detailed analysis and critique of one such initiative: "a two-year effort by a team at the Guardian newspaper to make the absent data present, leveraging what they called ‘verified crowdsourcing’ to get ‘undone science done.’ " Her analysis highlights how both the promise and the limitations of such projects are determined by the way news organizations conceptualize the role of citizens in the production of data and/or news, and how these conceptualizations are implemented through the specific design and implementation of crowdsourcing platforms. She concludes that, while flawed in several ways, crowdsourcing efforts such as the Guardian’s represent one important model for the future of journalism as a form of public knowledge that is especially critical as modern states move away from democratic ideals and functions.

In Chapter 6 Lisa Poggiali explores the politics of expertise as they play out through the lens of the Muhimu Mapping Project (MMP), a nongovernmental organization’s effort to produce the first publicly circulating map of any kind to acknowledge the existence of an invisible and illegal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. On the digital peripheries of Kenya’s growing technology sector known as Silicon Savannah, Poggiali explores the limitations inherent in ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development) efforts that pitted Kenya’s ethnically divisive history against its future modernity, fashioning ‘digital citizenship’ as an expression of the latter. Through extensive ethnographic research, she documents that while MMP helped to produce Nairobi’s urban poor as technical experts through their digital mapping project, the mapmakers’ sociopolitical status as slum dwellers colored the production and reception of the information they produced. As a result, the initiative ultimately undermined the mappers’ ability to utilize this expertise, thus reinforcing the social and political exclusion the mappers were attempting to overcome. She concludes that future scholarship on technologies in postcolonial contexts should focus not only on how new media technologies generate novel social relations or economic opportunities ‘at the margins’ . . . but also how they produce new explanatory models that both precipitate and conceal relations of inequality, and that we must analyze new media technologies as both potential vectors of sociopolitical recognition and battlegrounds on which the urban poor’s claims to inclusion are affirmed or ignored, heeded or disregarded.

Part III, Digital Media and Public Voices, continues Part II’s focus on the changing power relationships between political institutions, political elites, and citizens, though here the emphasis shifts from expertise to other ways in which citizens can collectively wield influence. In Chapter 7, Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo address the growing importance of online political discussion in nondemocratic contexts and the questions it raises about the nature and political consequences of authoritarian deliberation—deliberation that occurs in nations where censorship and/or surveillance is common. Drawing on data from 92 in-depth interviews as well as survey results from a random sample of 1,005 Chinese Internet users, Stockmann and Luo find that lurkers, who greatly outnumber those who actually participate in online discussions, are more concerned about privacy, not necessarily out of concern about censorship but more out of concern about how their close social networks may perceive them. Lurkers also tend to follow online discourse closely as they use social media to learn about politics. Therefore, this group of people tends to be composed of people who are already engaged in politics. Contrasted to this are discussants, who voice their views—not because of the information they gather from the discussion, but because of their need for recognition. As a result, they may not always present their views honestly, as they are more sensitive to response bias, but they are also less concerned about privacy and therefore likely to express opinions. To the extent that they do have privacy concerns, discussants seem to find ways to hide in cyberspace other than lurking—for example, by using fake accounts online. Several implications emerge from these findings. Even in totalitarian regimes, social media plays a role in allowing people who were otherwise likely to be excluded from public discourse to voice their opinions, providing a platform for people who are politically less engaged, thus fostering political engagement. But this somewhat promising finding is countered by the fact that biases in who express opinions online and who do not, coupled with Chinese officials’ and journalists’ use of the Internet as a means to learn about citizen preferences, can mean that while social media is likely to have a strong impact on setting the agenda for public discourse in China, it is unlikely to reflect public opinion on the issues it raises. In addition, this biased understanding of public opinion may become more pronounced as the state intervenes more directly in online discussion by actively censoring content.

The theme of the democratic utility of digital media in authoritarian regimes continues in the contribution by Jennifer Pan (Chapter 8), albeit in ways that challenge rather than simply inform political elites. In this chapter Pan examines the potential for the Internet and online social media platforms to disrupt the ability of authoritarian regimes to censor, and ultimately, to maintain political power by improving coordination in collective action against authoritarian regimes and increas[ing] the reliability of information, especially information that is not accommodating toward the regime. She does so by assessing whether or not the largely successful technical strategies of censoring social media employed by China are likely to be replicated by other countries, including but not limited to ostensibly authoritarian regimes. Through a mix of quantitative and qualitative analyses, she shows that China’s success in social media censorship is inexorably tied to the dominance of domestic companies that allows the government to quickly and reliably eliminate content deemed to be inappropriate, which in turn decreases the coordination potential of social media and covertly diminishes the reliability of information. Replicating these conditions in other authoritarian (as well as democratic) regimes would be difficult, since most are dominated by multinational firms (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, Twitter), which prevents these regimes from engaging effectively in censorship through content removal and forces them to depend on less effective methods such as content blocking. Pan further argues that the ability of domestic firms to dominate China’s social media market was the result of timing, in that their market penetration predated that of foreign companies. There is little evidence that once U.S. companies have established a strong foothold in other authoritarian regimes this dominance can be reversed through either the development of domestic social media platforms or the importing of Chinese ones. This is true even when these regimes engage in long-term content blocking (i.e., de facto protectionism). Taken as a whole, Pan’s findings suggest that China’s success at controlling content and thus limiting the democratic potential of digital media may be an outlier. And even in China, the negative impact of content control on domestic social media companies’ profits may lead to pressure to ease such control. But not unlike the conclusions reached by Stockmann and Luo, these more cautiously optimistic possibilities are tempered by the fact that regimes may choose to use other strategies, such as real-world repression, to impose control over social media, as appears to be the case in Russia.

The utility of digital media in efforts to challenge the state is an issue that goes beyond authoritarian regimes. In Chapter 9, Deen Freelon explores how the use of digital tools and technologies can, in the right context, influence the power of social movements in the United States. Central to Freelon’s approach is the argument that to understand the impact of social media, researchers must go beyond the use of ICTs by movements themselves, to include the broader set of actors that interact with one another on the issue. Most popular social media platforms, he notes, are open enough that movement actors cannot isolate themselves from commentary and criticism from individuals outside the movement. Such outside actors and interests can provide insight into a social movement’s capacity to achieve its goals. This capacity is an important type of power. Using Black Lives Matter as his case study, Charles Tilly’s concept of WUNC (worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment) as his measure of a social movement’s strength, and tweets about police shootings of unarmed black people as his data, Freelon demonstrates that the digital manifestations of three of WUNC’s four elements can be measured quantitatively and that these measures constitute consequential forms of social media power. He also finds that—at least in the case of Black Lives Matter—social movements have the power to dominate the larger social media conversations on the issue of relevance, though this dominance is not consistent in magnitude across metrics or across time. These shifts in the circulation of online power appear to be driven by major events of relevance, and by responses to these events by the movement, its critics, and other political actors.

Regulating Digital Democracies, the fourth and final part of this volume, returns to issues of structure and design, albeit as it relates to the state more than to technology. In Chapter 10 Helen Nissenbaum addresses the issue of privacy and privacy regulation in the era of data science. She dissects an argument that is gathering momentum in the academy, information industries, and public policy—that in an era in which policy designed to restrict information collection is increasingly untenable, attention should focus instead on how information is used. Nissenbaum unpacks the numerous conceptual ambiguities found in key terms such as privacy, collection, and use, demonstrating how greater definitional clarity reshapes debates over what she labels big data exceptionalism (BDE). She then interrogates and challenges the descriptive and the normative arguments underpinning the very notion of BDE—that is, its assumptions that regulating data collection is technically, institutionally, or ethically impossible, and/or that the benefits derived from BDEs would be lost by regulating collection and its potential harms can be controlled by regulating use. The conclusion Nissenbaum arrives at from this careful analysis is that the push to regulate use instead of collection is problematic and possibly even dangerous. What is needed, at a minimum, is to strengthen efforts to regulate both collection and use, and regulate collection and use along contextual lines, not lines of data ownership, in the hope of increasing the chances that data will serve the public interest, not merely at the discretion of the data holder (i.e., not as data philanthropy) but at the determination of the people’s will.

Central to Nissenbaum’s argument is her notion of conceptual integrity—that is, that privacy is about the appropriate flow of personal information, not control or secrecy. In Chapter 11, Philip Howard picks up this notion of information flow by exploring the democratic peril and promise of the Internet of Things (IoT), provocatively suggesting how it might come to rival a constitution as the primary structure of political life. Underlying Howard’s argument is a simple but important observation—that governance systems involve not just governments; they appear whenever a powerful actor can set rules and restrictions on people’s behavior—and an assumption—that the IoT, made up of billions of devices with small sensors . . . will generate perfect behavioral data without giving citizens the right to opt out of data collection. The behavioral data produced by this ubiquitous and invisible sensory network will, Howard argues, replace the traditional means of political representation and public voice in democratic societies. In short, the IoT will come to encapsulate our political lives, communicate our political values, and constitute our political identities. But will this new form of representation threaten or enhance democratic politics and the public will? The answer lies in part with the algorithms, terms of service, and interoperability protocols that make the IoT operate. These scripts are akin to political constitutions, which are, after all, collections of codified traditions and conventions that provide structure for political life. Given that the IoT will be the greatest surveillance network ever established, it is incumbent on us to settle on some basic forms of representation for the coming world of networked devices—that is, to establish a new constitution, one written for the public life and information infrastructure we are developing.

Good constitutions offer the terms under which we citizens agree to submit to an authority that is legitimate and not abusive. We need to consent to the IoT, because we will be surrendering our privacy for good. We will be submitting ourselves to data mining and behavioral analysis orders of magnitude more invasive, comprehensive, and valuable than we live with now. If we surrender our privacy to the IoT, we should get some protections and rights in exchange. Thus, if data is valuable and the primary value of the IoT, we need a social contract that turns on the notion that if we give up data, it must generate some public good. Data that flows from the IoT must concurrently generate value for innovative entrepreneurs and support civic values.

Individually, each of the chapters in this volume provides a nuanced, theoretically rich, empirically grounded, and substantively informative example of the complex relationships between digital media and democracy. Collectively, they provide a number of important insights: that there is no one way for scholars to study these relationships; that digital information and communication technologies have the potential to either enhance or encumber democratic practice; that their impact is context dependent, with multiple contingencies; that these contexts and contingencies can vary not only by technology or regime, but by the specific social, cultural, economic, and political rules and norms that can inhibit or encourage democratic forms of engagement.

Finally, these chapters collectively remind us that just as the question What is the impact of digital media on democracy? cannot be answered with a simple good or bad, promising or perilous, neither can the question, What is the future of democracy in the digital age? Democracy is not an either-or proposition. More or less hits closer to the mark, but even this misses the numerous ways in which models of democracy can vary (across polities and within them); the myriad acts that can constitute smaller but crucial democratic moments (even in otherwise nondemocratic or less democratic systems); and the numerous actors (from the private, public, and governmental sectors) that play a role in these micro-, meso-, and meta-level processes (see, e.g., Pateman 1970; Mansbridge 1983; Held 2006; Dahl 2015).

The thread connecting these democratic moments and models—to each other and to digital media—is that they individually and collectively influence citizens’ potential to have an authoritative voice in the allocation of a community’s goods, services, and values (Easton 1965). This voice can be codified in constitutions and laws, but also in codes and algorithms, as made clear in the chapters by Howard, Nissenbaum, and Bivens. It can be facilitated by the state and its actors (as the chapters by Kreiss and Noveck point out), but it also can be inhibited (as in the case presented by Gates), misrepresented (e.g., Stockmann and Luo), or purposively stifled (e.g., Pan) by the state. It can emerge, albeit often imperfectly, from the targeted efforts of nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Elliott and Earl), private-public partnerships (e.g., Poggiali; Gates), and grassroots movements (e.g., Freelon), as well as from the appropriation of technologies intended for other purposes (e.g., as in Stockmann and Luo; Poggiali; Pan). It can involve behaviors as diverse as campaigning (e.g., Kreiss), data gathering (e.g., Gates), protesting (e.g., Freelon; Elliott and Earl), and even map making (Poggiali), and people as diverse as young adults in the United States (Elliott and Earl), programmers in Nairobi (Poggiali), and Internet lurkers in China (Stockmann and Luo). And it can be limited—intentionally or not—in ostensibly democratic regimes (e.g., Elliott and Earl; Gates; Nissenbaum) and at least partially nourished—again, intentionally or not—in nondemocratic ones (e.g., Stockmann and Luo; Pan).

In short, the chapters in this volume show us that just as there are multiple, inconsistent, and path-dependent ways in which digital information and communication technologies can influence democratic norms, behaviors, and institutions, how they do so, and the democratic norms, behaviors, and institutions that are enhanced, constructed, or imperiled by them, are equally multiple, inconsistent, and path-dependent. Like that of information and communication technologies of the past (though perhaps more dramatically so), the democratic potential of digital media is matched only by its equally present potential to do harm. Ultimately, how digital media is used, what roles it plays in reconceptualizing twenty-first-century democratic practice and democratic systems, depends on context-specific political choices and political will. In short, the chapters in this volume tell us that there is no single future of democracy in the digital information environment—there are only futures.

References

Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Bimber, Bruce, and Richard Davis. 2003. Campaigning Online: The Internet in US Elections. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dahl, Robert. 2015. On Democracy. 2nd ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

Delli Carpini, Michael X. 2018. Alternative Facts: Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New U.S. Media Regime. In Trump and the Media, edited by Pablo Boczkowski and Zizi Papacharissi, 17–24. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Easton, David. 1965. A Framework for Political Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Held, David. 2006. Models of Democracy. 3rd ed. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.

Mansbridge, Jane. 1983. Beyond Adversary Democracy. New York: Basic Books. Pateman, Carole. 1970. Participation and Democratic Theory. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Sunstein, Cass R. 2001. Republic.com. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Williams, Bruce, and Michael X. Delli Carpini. 2011. After Broadcast News: Media Regimes, Democracy, and the New Information Environment. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

PART I

Designing Digital Democracies

CHAPTER 1

Programming the Rules of Engagement: Social Media Design and the Nonprofit System

Rena Bivens

Social Media for Social Change?

A rising crop of social media managers, coaches, and self-proclaimed gurus enthusiastically point to social media as a vital platform for a wide range of marketing and public relations activities. These voices add another layer on top of advocates who once focused on the promise of printing technologies, radio, television, online discussion groups, email, and websites. In many ways, then, social media offers another tool in the contemporary marketing toolbox. Social media may recycle the logics of old media in their design (van Dijck and Poell 2013), but it also appears to offer new affordances, such as the ability to reach publics old and new—including journalists, politicians, and previously unknown stakeholders (Sedereviciute and Valentini 2011). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given their personal investment in the debate, social media managers and coaches regularly place social media on a pedestal, imbuing these platforms with extraordinary powers. Many have set their sights on the nonprofit sector in particular, arguing that social media is a critical tool for social change (Mansfield 2012; Kanter and Fine 2010; Diaz-Ortiz 2011).

Of course there are also open critics of nonprofit social media use. For instance: It’s time to step away from the belief that charities have to be on social media and need to invest in it. It’s not the best marketing tool we have (Collins 2016). Instead, the advice is to activate dormant email lists, build effective website content, advertise on search results, and focus on search engine optimization. Social media managers are quick to defend their territory, typically arguing that critics are simply not using it effectively and that, regardless, social media cannot be ignored since it is the status quo and has revolutionized the very way in which humans interact with each other (Campbell 2016). Yet, as Feenberg (2016, 25) notes, We have had enough experience with [the Internet] by now to realize that it is a mixed phenomenon unlikely to fulfil the promise of democratic transformation it inspired in the early years. And according to Lim (2013, 638), Social media should not be perceived as a causal agent having a pivotal role in promoting social change or advancing democracy. Instead, societal contexts and arrangements around technology are key to its impact on politics (638).

To investigate the potential for nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to use social media for social change, I argue that we must interrogate the design of the social media platforms themselves—not simply the ways in which NPOs use the platforms. Design decisions made by platform owners and computer programmers impact the everyday work of NPOs, and the values that