By Brook Manville
Once upon a time, many thought the internet would spawn a digital democratic utopia: harmonious, boundary-spanning decision-making, reflecting liberty and equality in a global community of “netizens.” Today, sadly, we witness identity theft, cyber-bullying, manipulative analytics, fake news, and authoritarian surveillance— hacking elections and polarizing open societies. Social media companies are hiring thousands of editors to fight hate speech and robotic information corruption, while U.S. state election commissions are scrambling to reinstate paper ballots. Will today’s democracy survive the onslaught of technology-delivered malice?
Yes, maybe: but only if we stop blaming bits and bytes, forget about “global democracy,” and instead tackle the structural deficits of our current representative systems of national self-governance. Thus argues Dr. Roslyn Fuller, a Canadian-Irish academic lawyer and author of the new In Defence of Democracy.
Read the full article on Forbes.
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