Facebook’s Response to Its Democratic Discontents: Quality Initiatives, Ideology and Education’s Role

From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, academic, journalistic and corporate rhetoric linked digital social media to democratic affordances that advanced the quality of public sphere communication by empowering users to voice their concerns, listen to others’ views and engage in democratic debate with contesting positions on shared problems (e.g. Grossman 2006; Twist 2006; Shirky 2011; Gainous & Wagner 2013; Al-Jenaibi 2014; Hermida 2014; Bruns & High-field 2016). However, there has been increasing concern and discontent in the last few years among a wide array of academics with the discourse of social media as a democratizing force advancing public sphere communication