Disinformation as a Threat to Deliberative Democracy

• Author: Spencer McKay,Chris Tenove
• Date: 01 September 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912920938143
• Published date: 01 September 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912920938143

Political Research Quarterly

2021, Vol. 74(3) 703 –717

© 2020 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912920938143

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Article

The threat that online disinformation poses to democracy

has arguably made it “the defining political communica-

tion topic of our time” (Freelon and Wells 2020, 145),

particularly in the wake of high-profile Russian interfer-

ence in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Referring to

Russia’s role in that election, former Central Intelligence

Agency Acting Director Michael Morell stated, “It is an

attack on our very democracy. It’s an attack on who we

are as a people . . . this is to me not an overstatement, this

is the political equivalent of 9/11” (Morell and Kelly

2016). In its Online Harms White Paper, the United

Kingdom similarly warns that there is “a real danger that

hostile actors use online disinformation to undermine our

democratic values and principles” (United Kingdom

Parliament 2019, 5). These concerns have motivated

widespread demands for policy changes, although these

demands are often unclear about the democratic values

and principles at risk (Tenove 2020).

How might disinformation harm democracy? One

possibility, which has received extensive attention from

policymakers and researchers, is that disinformation

may change election outcomes. This emphasis has seri-

ous limitations. First, concerns about disinformation

changing electoral outcomes may be overblown. There is

an ongoing debate about whether disinformation can

significantly influence voting preferences (Allcott and

Gentzkow 2017; Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler 2018), in

part because voting preferences tend to be relatively sta-

ble despite campaign messaging (Kalla and Broockman

2018). Second, empirical research shows that disinfor-

mation campaigns are frequently designed to achieve

goals other than changing election outcomes, such as

undermining the institutions and social conditions neces-

sary for democracies to function. Third, from a norma-

tive perspective, democracy is not reducible to elections.

As a complement to an emphasis on electoral outcomes,

we argue that a deliberative democracy framework can

help clarify the normative harms of disinformation in

ways that make sense of the growing empirical literature

on the tactics, aims, and outcomes of disinformation

campaigns.

938143PRQXXX10.1177/1065912920938143Political Research QuarterlyMcKay and Tenove

research-article2020

1The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Corresponding Author:

Chris Tenove, Department of Political Science, The University of

British Columbia, C425-1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, Canada BC

V6T 1Z1.

Email: cjtenove@mail.ubc.ca

Disinformation as a Threat to

Deliberative Democracy

Spencer McKay1 and Chris Tenove1

Abstract

It is frequently claimed that online disinformation threatens democracy, and that disinformation is more prevalent

or harmful because social media platforms have disrupted our communication systems. These intuitions have not

been fully developed in democratic theory. This article builds on systemic approaches to deliberative democracy to

characterize key vulnerabilities of social media platforms that disinformation actors exploit, and to clarify potential

anti-deliberative effects of disinformation. The disinformation campaigns mounted by Russian agents around the

United States’ 2016 election illustrate the use of anti-deliberative tactics, including corrosive falsehoods, moral

denigration, and unjustified inclusion. We further propose that these tactics might contribute to the system-level anti-

deliberative properties of epistemic cynicism, techno-affective polarization, and pervasive inauthenticity. These harms

undermine a polity’s capacity to engage in communication characterized by the use of facts and logic, moral respect,

and democratic inclusion. Clarifying which democratic goods are at risk from disinformation, and how they are put

at risk, can help identify policies that go beyond targeting the architects of disinformation campaigns to address

structural vulnerabilities in deliberative systems.

Keywords

disinformation, deliberative democracy, media regulation, systems, social media, political communication