Democratic Equality in the Misinformation Age

Abstract

Conventional wisdom blames the “epistemic crisis” of American politics on the leveling force of social media and the collapse of traditional gatekeepers. This dissertation argues democracy’s vulnerability to misinformation stems not from too equal a public sphere but from the epistemically debilitating effects of pervasive social inequality. Entrenched inequalities incentivize media institutions new and old to circulate discourses that legitimize injustice, reinforce stereotypes, foster distrust, and render audiences vulnerable to identity-based manipulation. Answering democracy’s epistemic challenges requires recentering the demands of political equality in an increasingly complex and fragmented media ecosystem.

To that end, I develop a new democratic theory of media institutions that emphasizes their role in securing relations of equality among socially diverse and geographically diffuse citizens. The first half of this dissertation defends a novel account of how political equality anchors democracy’s epistemic foundations and how inequality upsets them. Chapter 1 reconstructs John Dewey’s writings on propaganda to argue pathologies of misinformation are best seen as products of an unequal social structure that keeps citizens isolated from and ignorant of one another. In doing so, I outline Dewey’s call for a distinctly institutionalist politics of public spheres. Chapter 2 argues that democratic theorists have thus far failed to develop such a politics because they have conflated equality’s communicative dimension with deliberation. Against this view, I argue equality ought to be grounded in citizens’ capacity to contribute to the institutional circuits of mass communication that precede and structure interpersonal communicative acts. Chapter 3 draws on James Madison and W.E.B. Du Bois to describe how media institutions can put this account into practice by circulating epistemic goods citizens have a reasonably equal hand in making.

The next three chapters test and refine my theory by applying it to three institutions at the heart of American democracy’s epistemic dysfunction: elite political communication, news journalism, and social media platforms. Chapter 4 explores how electoral incentives lead politicians to amplify and perpetuate the prejudices of strategically well-positioned voters in political messaging. Chapter 5 critiques Meiklejohnian defenses of journalism as insufficiently attentive to the distorting effects of inequality and proposes an alternative egalitarian defense that places stronger demands on news outlets. Chapter 6 relies on Hannah Arendt to argue that social media corporations’ power over the structural conditions of communication divests citizens of the democratic agency necessary for relations of equality. In each of these chapters, I show how a commitment to egalitarian democracy sets an attractive and practical agenda for reform. A short conclusion urges democratic theorists to see institutional reconstruction and participatory politics as complementary and self-reflexive means of transforming political communication.