Democracy, Technology, and Human Irresponsibility

Abstract

With the current development of information and communication technology, it must be a good time for democracy. Democracy depends on deliberation and good information. Most people of modern society are ubiquitously connected to the Internet through their smartphones, they can anytime engage in public discourse, express their views without the help of any representative, or search information to make a good decision. The technology is supposed to make people more connected with each other and more knowledgeable than their predecessors. However, rather than raising the quality of democracy, the same technology is now considered to have threatened democracy. The technology makes it easy for irresponsible people to spread disinformation and hate speech. And the technology also makes people unable to deal with the abundant irresponsible information. To mitigate the problem, it is necessary for social media platform to be able to trace the true identities of its users, just like what has already been done in ecommerce or “sharing economy” platforms.