Social Media for Democracy

当前对21世纪初民主危机的诊断有一个共同的争论参考点：（隐含的）参考政治公共领域功能失调的宪法，目前正在经历结构性变革。社交媒体平台的兴起被认为是其主要组成部分之一。虽然社交媒体使公共领域更加开放，从而更具响应性，但这些平台也导致了分裂和排斥的新机制，侵蚀了公共辩论的规范，并失去了对传统机构的信任。该项目将通过(1)为社交媒体对政治辩论的社会影响提供更好的经验证据，(2)理解这种影响的主要因果机制，以及(3)开发工具来重新考虑这场危机的诊断，这些工具可以提高社交媒体在自由民主中促进公共领域运作的能力，即审议、合法化和民主主体的自我感知。

Social media for democracy – understanding the causal mechanisms of digital citizenship (SoMe4Dem) Current diagnoses that democracy isin crisis at the beginning of the 21st century share a common argumentative reference point: the (implicit) reference to the dysfunctional constitution of the political public sphere which is currently undergoing structural change. The rise ofsocial media platformsis considered as one of its main constituents. While social media make the public arena more open and thus more responsive, these platforms also lead to new mechanisms of fragmentation and exclusion, an erosion of norms in public debate and a loss of trust in traditional institutions. The project will reconsider the diagnoses of this crisis by (1) providing better empirical evidence for the impact of social media on society with respect to political debates, (2) understanding the main causal mechanisms of this impact and (3) developing tools that improve the capacity of social media to contribute to the functioning of the public arena in a liberal democracy, i.e., deliberation, legitimation and the self-perception of the democratic subject.