Untrustworthy online news is a challenge for democracy

In his nuggety little book What is Populism?, the Princeton academic Jan-Werner Müller suggests that populists reveal themselves when they try to deny the legitimacy of their political opponents or some of the citizenry: “What matters is populists’ anti-pluralism. They always exclude others … they claim to be the only legitimate representatives of the people and hence all others are at least morally excluded; and, less obviously … those who do not conform to the populists’ symbolic construction of the ‘real people’ are also shut out.” It is up to other politicians to hold the democratic line, Müller says. His analysis came to mind last week when Theresa May offered a kind of pep talk on democracy. She was in Manchester (birthplace of the Guardian) to mark 100 years since some women gained the vote.

The same day, the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) released the latest of its valuable papers, which, in effect, chart how populism is spreading through social media. Americans seem increasingly divided. Each side – but especially the Trump support group, on this evidence at least – is more entrenched with others of like mind, and prone to share similar sources of information, lots of it unreliable.

Also last week, a UK parliamentary committee enquiring into fake news trekked to Washington DC in the hope that representatives of Twitter, Facebook and Google, three of the most consequential entities in current political life, would talk more frankly about the challenges they face on behalf of everyone who would hold the line for democracy. The result seemed mixed.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/11/untrustworthy-online-news-challenge-democracy?