Is it possible to create the conditions of deliberative democracy on the internet?
by Evelyn Li
Should deliberative democracy be our goal?
In democracy theory, deliberative democracy is held up as an ideal or “best practice.” In “Truth, Deliberative Democracy, and the Virtues of Accuracy: Is Fake News Destroying the Public Sphere?”, UC-Irvine Professor Simone Chambers paints a quaint picture of deliberative democracy: “the mini-public wherein citizens come together in face-to-face designed settings with good information, trained moderators, and procedural norms that promote participant equality in the deliberative and decision-making process… there is ample empirical evidence that citizens in these contexts are effective rational problem solvers pursuing evidence-driven solutions to political problems.”
Chambers relies on the theory of Jürgen Habermas to explain the real moral and intellectual power of democracy: democracy has “truth-tracking potential.” That is, “the core features of democracy from a deliberative or discursive perspective—such as open and free debate, equal status of citizens, a porous and critical public sphere… can be… terms of the conditions needed to test truth claims” (Chambers). The point of doing democracy is to get at the truth. It is the Life of the Mind!
As Professor Chris Bail at Duke University puts it, “One of the most ancient ideas in Western thought is that rational deliberation will produce better societies. The notion that societies function more smoothly when people form their opinions based on a wide range of evidence has become part of the bedrock of democracy.”
Chambers admits, “The claim that democracy has a truth-tracking potential is pitched at a high level of abstraction.” Activities at the Stanford University Center for Deliberative Democracy could serve to clarify and demonstrate what this means in practice. Stanford has trademarked Deliberative Polling®. The methodology is as follows: “Deliberative Polling is an attempt to use public opinion research in a new and constructive way. A random, representative sample is first polled on the targeted issues. After this baseline poll, members of the sample are invited to gather at a single place for a weekend to discuss the issues. Carefully balanced briefing materials are sent to the participants and are also made publicly available. The participants engage in dialogue with competing experts and political leaders based on questions they develop in small group discussions with trained moderators… After the deliberations, the sample is asked again the original questions. The resulting changes in opinion represent the conclusions the public would reach if people had the opportunity to become more informed and more engaged by the issues.”
The director of the center, Professor James Fishkin, says: “Most citizens don’t take the time to become anything like ideal citizens or informed citizens… This is a way of asking, ‘What if they did?’ How would democracy be different?’ It turns out it would be very different.” Bail believes Fishkin’s Deliberative Polling venues are analogous to the salon—invented in Italy, beloved by Habermas, and “a critical precursor to modern democracy” (Bail). Historically, “salons were small-group discussions about current events…a forum to discuss shared challenges” (Bail).
Is the internet a deliberative space?
Ostensibly, the internet provides an opportunity for the salon, for deliberative democracy, to go digital. Many circumstances are in favor of the internet having truth-tracking potential: “Social media offered people seemingly endless access to information they could use to form their views. And social media could also allow users to discuss such information with a much more diverse group of people than they might encounter in offline settings” (Bail).
This essay argues, however, that the internet has made truth less accessible, or at the very least, less collective. Firstly, the internet is a distracted space more so than it is a deliberative space. Secondly, major internet companies regard their bottom lines over the truth. Lastly, communication norms on the internet sacrifice truth as well.
In his book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr uses neuroscience to explore the epistemological limitations of the internet. Online, we are somewhat cognitively impaired: “The Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively.” Thus, the medium of the internet is itself against deliberation.
The content of the internet is also flawed, and Professor Lawrence Lessig at Harvard Law School does one of the best jobs of explaining this in They Don’t Represent Us. Walter Lippman famously wrote about “the picture in our heads”, and through tracking our internet usage, companies can now peek in to see this picture. Then they show us more just like it: “As the technology of media became more and more sensitive to us individually, it would become more and more responsive to what we individually would want” (Lessig). The incentive behind getting to know us is to keep us online and to sell us things: “The logic that drives the Facebook algorithms is not the truth, or balance, or understanding, or importance. The logic is engagement for the purpose of selling ads” (Lessig). When advertisement revenue is put above truth, we are unable to do democracy well: “It naturally and obviously and demonstrably drives people away from the understanding they need to make the judgements we require” (Lessig).
The manner in which these half-truths are communicated is just the nail in the coffin. The most prolific and most opinionated on the internet are an unrepresentative sample, and often they write in harsh and nasty tones.
One reason the internet is not deliberative, in the view of Professor Chambers, is that “Communication is asymmetrical in the sense that the majority are consumers of messages rather than producers of messages.” As former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss has written, there is a new attitude that “truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” True deliberation must be a give and take—a mediation, a reconciliation. Martin Buber presented this philosophy in his 1952 speech, “Hope for this Hour”: “All great civilization has been in a certain measure a Civilization of the Dialogue. The life substance of them all was not, as one customarily thinks, the presence of significant individuals, but their genuine intercourse with one another” (Buber). Deliberation, ideally, takes the form of a seminar, not a lecture.
Even when real dialogue happens online, it is too normally an uncivil dialogue. According to Professor Bail, “Nearly one in three Americans has witnessed someone being physically threatened online” (Bail, 74). Belligerence pays off: researchers at NYU have found that “posts exhibiting ‘indignant disagreement’ [receive] nearly twice as much engagement” (Haidt and Rose-Stockwell).
Civility is a mode of communication identified by the University of Chicago’s Professor Russell Johnson in his paper “The Three Voices in the Ethics of Communication.” Johnson finds an ambassador for civility in Professor Stephen L. Carter at Yale Law School. Professor Carter says that civility is “the etiquette of democracy” and “necessary [for] us to travel in democratic peace with our fellow passengers” (Johnson).
The importance of civility becomes clear when the alternatives are examined. Johnson uses legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky to personify “the Victory standpoint.” In short, Alinsky was willing to play dirty to score wins for the downtrodden. Alinsky endorses “demonizing, including smear campaigns based on lies” and also “outright dishonesty (both to his own group and to their opponents” (Johnson). There is, of course, an “ends justify the means” logic to this, which has its own moral weight. It still comes at the expense of the truth. Losing civility goes hand in hand with losing the truth-tracking potential of democracy.
Is it possible to create the conditions of deliberative democracy on the internet?
Common Ground for Action is an online platform with a design emphasis on deliberation. It was studied by political scientists Ryan Kennedy, Anand E. Sokhey, Claire Abernathy, Kevin M. Esterling, David MJ Lazer, Amy Lee, William Minnozi, and Michael A. Neblo, who co-wrote the article “Demographics and (Equal?) Voice: Assessing Participation in Online Deliberative Sessions.”
Sessions begin with participants reading a “non-partisan issue guide for the topic that takes participants through several policy options—with their advantages and tradeoffs” (Kennedy). The explicit purpose of the session is to then seek common ground: “participants are asked whether they support each action and whether they can live with a tradeoff. Preferences are revealed simultaneously and in aggregate. Participants then discuss each action with each other through a synchronous text chat platform…At the end of the session, those actions for which at least 75% of participants express support— and say they could tolerate the tradeoff— become the common ground for action” (Kennedy). There are several built-in features of a Common Ground for Action session that are constitutive to deliberation. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, participants did the same readings and are working from a common set of facts. Each session is also guided by a moderator who “received training to…[move] the conversation along without adding new interpretations or editorial comments…moderators are able to ensure that all participants have an equal chance to contribute, that different perspectives are expressed, and that no deliberators dominate the conversation” (Kennedy). Equal participation is promoted by the moderator inviting all participants to formally report their preferences ahead of discussion. This empowers every participant to express their opinion without having to choose to jump in.
Interestingly, Common Ground for Action obscures “visual cues of deliberator demographics”—participants lack identifying profile pictures, and their screen names are only their first names. This approach is opposite of the Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy, which emphasizes on humanizing in-person interactions. Common Good for Action believes that, at least online, relative anonymity is protective and “may increase contributions from marginal group participants by ameliorating issues involving social pressure” (Kennedy).
Overall, Common Ground for Action is a tightly controlled environment extremely different from the majority of the world wide web. There is also the question of scale: possibly, deliberative democracy can only work in “mini-publics”, to borrow from Chambers one last time. Bail also notes that salons were “small-group discussions”, and what mattered so much to Buber was the potential between just two people. If small coziness is a prerequisite for deliberation, however, it is hard to see how democracy could be sustained by a nation at large, and that is concerning.
Resources
Bail, Chris. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton University Press. 2021.
Buber, Martin. “Hope for This Hour.” From Pointing the Way.
Chambers, Simone. “Truth, Deliberative Democracy, and the Virtues of Accuracy: Is Fake News Destroying the Public Sphere?” Political Studies Association, Vol. 69 (2021): 147-163
De Witte, Melissa. “Could Deliberative Democracy De-polarize America? Stanford Scholars Think So” Stanford News, 4 Feb. 2021
Haidt, Jonathan and Tobias Rose-Stockwell. “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 12 Nov. 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763/
Johnson, Russell. “The Three Voices in the Ethics of Communication”
Kennedy et al. “Demographics and (Equal?) Voice: Assessing Participation in Online Deliberative Sessions” Political Studies Association, Vol. 69 (2021): 66-88.
Lessig, Lawrence. They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy. New York: Harper Collins. 2019.
Weiss, Bari. “Resignation Letter.” 15 July 2020. https://www.bariweiss.com/resignation-letter