The Convergence of Populism, Conspiracy Theories, and Social Media in the Construction of Threats to Democracy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In our current era, dominated as it is by digitalization in its varied forms, the dynamic interplay of populism, conspiracy theory, and social media has significant consequences for the democratic functioning of society. In this paper I identify and discuss some of these consequences, with an analytic emphasis on how this dynamic may be contributing to the emergence of a contemporary crisis in democracy in both Canada and the United States. In my discussion, I outline the contours of this impending democratic crisis in terms of several developments: the polarization of society and the development of a crisis politics, enhanced conditions for encouraging the expression of political violence, the development of a post-truth society, and establishing the conditions for the rise of oligarchy. I suggest that all these developments impede the proper functioning of democracies in significant ways, paying particular attention to selective affinities between populism and conspiracy theories. If we learn from the American case, Canada is not immune, and we need to take up these concerns seriously if we care about democracy and its future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".