What, if anything, is new about technology’s threat to democracy in a digital age?

Abstract

There is growing concern around the threats posed by digital technologies to democracy. This paper explores two of the most potent digital threats, misinformation and echo chambers, against a two-part criterion of fundamental democratic features that come into close contact with these digital threats: the deliberative process and trust. I then compare the digital threats to their closest historical counterparts. I conclude that these threats are indeed both quantitatively and qualitatively new and distinct from their predecessors. This is based on five differentiating factors, which relate to the quality of misinformation, the type of echo chambers, persuasion methods, the transfer of trust, and polarisation.