One of our era’s most influential narratives is that social media is destroying democracy and perhaps civilisation itself. For the liberal establishment, this story helps to explain the surging success of right-wing populism, as well as collapsing institutional trust, growing polarisation, and an apparent explosion of misinformation and deranged conspiracy theories.

The standard formulation of this narrative treats social media as a dysfunctional technology. Because algorithms and other platform features are designed to capture people’s attention and keep them scrolling, they amplify content that is sensationalist, bias-confirming, and divisive. This viral content then infects public opinion and political debate, driving large numbers of people to adopt misinformed and hateful ideas hostile to liberal democracy.

I’ve criticised this narrative. Although social media platforms undoubtedly reward low-quality discourse, narratives that place significant weight on this fact to explain recent political developments are misguided. They rest on implausibly rosy pictures of legacy media and pre-social media history. They’re not well-supported by scientific studies. They overstate the public’s manipulability and underestimate organic demand for low-quality content. And they conveniently overlook more consequential causes of anti-establishment backlash, including the objective gap between the cultural preferences of elites and those of many voters.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see no connection between social media and the rise of populism. To make sense of this connection, however, we should focus less on social media as a dysfunctional technology and more on its status as a democratising technology.

The End of the Gatekeepers

Democracy entails equality among citizens in their power to influence collective decisions. “One person, one vote” embodies this principle, but such formal equality can obviously co-exist with extreme inequalities in practice. It’s easy to get bogged down in tedious philosophical debates about how much political equality is required for societies to be “truly” democratic. Still, we can safely say that societies become more democratic as they increasingly equalise citizens’ power to shape the political process.

By that measure, mass media and the public sphere have been extremely undemocratic throughout most of history. As Brian Klaas observes, although previous communication revolutions (e.g., the printing press, radio, and television) expanded the audience for information, information production remained primarily in the hands of wealthy, well-connected elites.

The internet and then social media changed this. By removing barriers to entry and the influence of elite gatekeepers, they radically