President Trump’s Tweets Demonstrate How Social Media Can Hurt Democracy

American historian Jill Lepore believes that the dominant medium of communication in any age is a large element in determining the way politics are conducted. In fact, she has claimed it can be the only element. “The American two-party system is a creation of the press,” she argues. “When the press is in the throes of change, so is the party system It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that the accelerating and atomizing forces of this latest communications revolution will bring about the end of the party system and the beginning of a new and wobblier political institution.”

“At some point,” she adds, “does each of us become a party of one?”

The political power of social media has been evident for some time. Pictures of a fruit seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, immolating himself in a Tunisian town after police confiscated his unlicensed vegetable cart in 2010 helped spark a revolution that became one of the first heralds of the Arab spring. In countries like Iran, Turkey, and Russia, texts on cell phones have brought demonstrators onto the streets. In China, information on Weibo and WeChat, the local equivalents of (banned) Twitter (twtr, +0.98%), flash news of scandals, strikes and protests across the country, prompting President Xi Jinping to thunder that the media, including social media, must be disciplined. Until a couple of decades ago, you had to be very rich to acquire the technology to address the nation. Now, you have to be very poor indeed not to have the technology to address the world.

For some years, though, it’s been clear to some that popular communications come with a sting in the tail. One of the loudest voices in explaining that sting has been Evgeny Morozov, a young Belarusian polymath who branded the utopian view of online freedom—endorsed by both Bill and Hilary Clinton—as “excessive optimism and empty McKinsey-speak,” insisting that the ability to identify dissidence would lead to the strengthening, not the overthrow, of authoritarian power.

Morozov was referring to despotic states. More recently, President Trump is one of those who have shown us how the power of social media works in a great democracy. It works so that the powerful, the very rich and the celebrated rule in that space—not as they did in the mainstream media’s high period, but in a more interactive, yet at times more effective, way.

A politician or business leader or a celebrity speaking on television usually addresses the masses through an interlocutor—a presenter, a journalist. On social media, the same figure is talking to you, on your cellphone, through your twitter feed. You—we—are a party of one.

The interlocutor in the studio, the editor in his office, is almost gone. It’s the celebrity and you. The famous figure can say anything which is judged to please or rouse you: and if you like it, why check whether it’s true? Those who publish fake news boosting Trump (as much of it did) and who live as far away as Georgia (the one in the former Soviet Union, not the American South) make a good living from churning it out, all the while expressing amazement, and a little contempt, that so many seem to believe it.

To the powerful, power has again been given. It isn’t that social media don’t help sociability. But is it better for our politics?

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