Making social media an instrument of democracy

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/eulj.12312
• Published date: 01 March 2019
• Author: Thomas Wischmeyer
• Date: 01 March 2019

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Making social media an instrument of democracy

Thomas Wischmeyer*

Abstract

In recent years, the responsibility of social media platforms towards their users and society at large

has become a major political issue. However, the regulatory responses to the crisis of social media

are still mostly considered unsatisfactory, as demonstrated by the widespread criticism of the

German Network Enforcement Act of 2017. This article compares the current constitutional dis-

course on social media regulation with the debates that accompanied the last major transformation

of the media landscape: the rise of broadcasting. While we certainly do not find a roadmap for social

media regulation in the past, the key concept of the broadcasting discourse—the idea of media as a

sphere of ‘institutional freedom’—can be applied to the challenges of today and can be used to

strengthen the democratic function of social media.

1|DIGITALISATION: TRANSFORMATION OR RECONFIGURATION?

Over recent years, two major narratives have developed in response to the question: What kind of challenge do dig-

ital technologies pose for society? The first, which understands digitalisation

1

as a fundamental discontinuity in the

very fabric of society, takes its arguments largely from the post‐war literature on technocracy. In the 1950s and

1960s, philosophers and sociologists argued that in the industrial age, technology had lost its emancipatory potential

and that instrumental rationality, as it is embedded in our devices and artefacts, had infected human minds. Writers

across the ideological spectrum including Martin Heidegger, Norbert Wiener and Helmuth Schelsky described why

capitalism slowly transforms human power over nature, materialised in technology, into the control of technology

over men and society. And they concluded that technological progress impoverishes human lives and ultimately

enables a system of total domination.

2

Herbert Marcuse, probably the most prominent voice of this movement,

put it as follows:

For the concept of technical reason is itself perhaps ideology. Not merely its application, but technique

itself is domination …The aims and interests of domination are not ‘additional’or dictated to technique

from above—they enter into the construction of the technical apparatus itself. For technique is a social

*

Assistant Professor, Bielefeld, Germany. Parts of this paper were originally presented at the 4th German–South African Dialogue on Democracy, University

of Mannheim, July 2018.

1

‘Digitalisation’is understood here not in the narrow sense of converting analog information into a digital format, but as the process of change all sectors of

society are currently undergoing in response to the proliferation of digital technologies. For a nuanced account of this process, see D. Baecker, 4.0 oder Die

Lücke die der Rechner lässt (Merve, 2018).

2

M. Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre (Neske, 1962); N. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Houghton Mifflin, 1950); H. Schelsky, Der Mensch in

der wissenschaftlichen Zivilisation (Westdeutscher Verlag, 1961). For an overview of this debate, see B. Seibel, Cybernetic Government (Springer, 2016).

Received: 12 December 2018 Accepted: 7 February 2019

DOI: 10.1111/eulj.12312

Eur Law J. 2019;25:169–181. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/eulj 169