ABSTRACT
NO: They allow new, radical voices into the debate, thereby facilitating democratic forms of policymaking
Social media do not make constructive climate policymaking harder. This is, first, because science is not a series of ‘facts’ discovered only by scientists in labs and accepted uncritically by everyone else. Critics have always challenged orthodoxies: new social media just open the discussion up to more people, more quickly than ever before, and for free. This matters because although science reveals that the planet is warming, it does not dictate what we should do about it. Second, social media also give voice to those who—given the scale of the problem—challenge conceptions of what is ‘constructive’ in terms of policymaking thus enabling demands for more radical change to be voiced.
