18 August, 2025 | Christopher Lord

Principles for a Democratically Legitimate Digitalisation

Digital technologies have become a part of the infrastructure of contemporary democracies. They have changed how parties, parliaments and publics deliberate and communicate. They have transformed how governments and representatives contest elections; how they structure voter choice; how they compete; how they reach out to different pools of voters; and how they give and demand accounts and justifications without which there can be no public control. 

By what principles, then, should digital technologies be regulated? What should consumers who are also citizens demand of social media and digital platforms? When should they complain, feel outraged, question the reputation or credibility of providers; or, where it is possible, take their custom elsewhere? What norms should providers internalise and enforce upon themselves if we are to believe them when they claim to contribute to democracy? Where are democracies justified in demanding autonomy and non-interference in how they regulate digitalisation?

Much has been said about the need for an ethical digitalisation without risks to privacy, health and vulnerable groups; and without abuse of new technologies to dominate, deceive or control. But, ethics concern relationships between all human beings. Political legitimacy raises the different question of how those who share a democracy  should govern digitalisation. Legitimate digitalisation is prior to any ethical digitalisation. Without standards of democratic legitimacy – and, therefore, democratic control – standards of ethical digitalisation would be arbitrary and paternalistic. They would be ‘regulator knows best’ answers to what are ‘good’ and ‘right’ forms of digitalisation rather than rules that can ultimately be controlled and authored by publics. 

Threat and Opportunity

Digitalisation is both threat and opportunity to democratic standards of public control with political equality. It provides citizens with greater means of exercising informed control of their political systems. But it also exposes them to manipulation in ways that risk the very agency of democratic citizens as voters and in their everyday formation of public opinion. 

Digitalisation creates a new public space. But it can also undermine the concept of the public. A public requires citizens who are aware of themselves as living together under the same laws and responsible to one another for the shared democratic control of those laws. In contrast, digitalisation can create silos, echo-chambers and polarisation. 

Digitalisation risks turning democracy into a tragedy of the commons. Several aspects of democracy – notably trust and mutual understanding- are common resources at risk of depletion by forms of digitalisation that polarise.

Cutting across all the foregoing is the impact of digitalisation on political equality. Digitalisation may become an essential part of our democracies – the main place of public debate and opinion formation – without all opinions having equal access or without a part of the population being fully able to use digital technologies.

Digitalisation may be inherently oligopolitistic,  or even monopolistic. Scale economies and positive network effects may mean that digital technologies only reach their full potential where many people use the same – one – system of communication. The big digital oligopolies are concentrated in the US, which may, therefore, have limited incentive to regulate all the negative externalities of its tech companies for other democracies. Public power needed to regulate digitalisation may also be easily captured or bought. 

Standards for a Democratically Legitimate Digitalisation

So what standards should be required of a democratically legitimate digitalisation?

Reason-giving. Democracy is a system in which citizens can be outvoted and coerced into doing what they would rather not do. Democratically-made laws, therefore, need justifications. So do opinions that contribute to those laws. Digital platforms should expect claims in public debate to be supported by reasons.  Users should also expect that of themselves and of one another. 

Respect Fundamental Rights in the round. Freedom in what can be said is not the only freedom of speech. As John Stuart Mill (1972 [1859]: 78 ) observed, we also interfere in the autonomy of others and their right to make up their own minds by telling them ‘what they should be allowed to hear.’  Hearing the other side is also the antidote to polarisation. Digital platforms and citizens who use them should expose themselves to counter-arguments and not seek to avoid them. 

Equal rights and equal access. The rights of each also need to be compatible with the rights for all. Digital platforms should level inequalities in access to public debate, not reproduce them. A double equality of access to digital debates is needed: of citizens and of all points of view. 

Truth-seeking. There are few truths in politics. Maybe we should just accept that and aim merely for such mutual understanding as we can achieve? But that will not quite do. What about blatant lies presented as if they were facts? Surely we can agree some things are ‘untrue’ even where it is hard to agree what is ‘true’? Surely public debate should at least aim at the truth? Disinformation is an attack on freedom of expression where it distorts – without possibility of complaint or challenge – what others have said in exercising their own freedom of expression. Even, indeed, where elaborate policing is difficult and undesirable, self-enforcement of norms can be helped by awareness of how avoiding disinformation is a part of what is needed to live together with others in a shared democracy. If,  as Robert Goodin (2010: 731 & 738) puts it, ‘democratic politics amounts to giving laws to ourselves […] lying […] interferes with collective self-government’. Those who believe misinformation can end up basing their contributions to public opinion formation or public control on falsehoods they assume to be true. 

Overcoming asymmetries of information. Empowering citizens through digitalisation should aim at improving their representation and not just their participation in new forms of public opinion formation. The tragedy of its misuse is that digitalisation is otherwise an opportunity to overcome one of the main obstacles to using representative democracy to deliver better public control with political equality: namely, huge asymmetries of information between executives and elected representatives, between those representatives and those they represent, and between some citizens and others. To overcome asymmetries of information digitalisation needs to emancipate itself from misinformation.

References

Goodin, R. (2010) ‘Perverting the Course of Politics’, British Journal of Political Science 40: 725-739.

Mill, J. S. (1972 [1861]) Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative Government, London: Dent.