ABSTRACT
Democracy is in decline worldwide. In its Democracy Report 2022, the V-Dem Institute concludes that the level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 is down to 1989 levels. It is striking that the period of democratic backsliding coincides with the appearance of a new media landscape: traditional media is in decline while countless new sources have emerged on the scene – alternative news sites, public Facebook pages, blogs, and websites run by political actors. The choice of sources increasingly falls to the individual, leaving plenty of room for psychological biases to determine what content we consume, or to social media algorithms, which tend to prioritize user engagement over source reliability. In this chapter, I shall reflect on the role of truth, or knowledge, in democracy and examine how mis- and disinformation can harm democracy. I shall argue that there are reasons to take very seriously the hypothesis that the threats to knowledge resulting from the new media landscape also threaten democracy.
