Bibliographic record
Abstract
While at their origins, the web and social media held great promise for open information sharing and public debate, today these ideals have been compromised. To what extent is digital democracy still possible on social media, and what shapes its potential? This dissertation investigates the quality of democratic participation on social media in electoral and social movement contexts. I argue that facilitating open communication is no longer the primary function of social media platforms, due to a shift in the balance of power away from ordinary citizens, towards organized interests. I analyze the implications derived from my theory using three empirical chapters and social media data from X, formerly Twitter, and Reddit. First, organizations, such as political parties, have intensified their use of automation for public outreach. The first empirical chapter tests whether the use of automation has facilitated a growth in relative influence between social bots and humans during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections on X. I find that social bots became more influential and strategic in their interactions in 2020. Second, organizations, such as publicly traded companies and their investors, have an interest in shaping public discourse on social media. In the second chapter, I analyze the effect of the institutional- and retail-focused Reddit discourse on the stock market during the 2021 GameStop short squeeze movement. Results indicate an impressive feat of successful collective action, although limited to the centerpiece of the social movement. Third, imbalances in user composition in terms of political ideology can lead to less objective moderation decision making. In the final empirical chapter, I examine the effect of user political ideology, automation use, and toxic content on user suspensions using X data that captured the 2019 Canadian federal election. I show that user suspensions had a tendency to target conservative-leaning users. Taken together, these findings suggest that digital democracy is becoming increasingly constrained by organized interests. If we falter in our convictions to build a better world online now, the downfall of digital democracy may be on the horizon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".