Democracy and digital disintegration: Platforms, actors, citizens

The rapid and profound transformations associated with contemporary media systems have severe consequences for democracy and public debates. Social media play an increasingly central role in political participation, particularly among young citizens, and digital platforms have significantly altered how political parties strategically mobilise voters and influence public opinion (Perloff, 2022). Digital platforms have also become central venues for the distribution and circulation of news (Nielsen & Fletcher, 2023), encompassing traditional as well as alternative and hyperpartisan forms, while simultaneously serving as arenas for interactive public deliberation (Hase et al., 2023)

There is no doubt that contemporary democratic societies have had much to gain from the structural changes in the media landscape that have taken place over the last decades. The endless supply of information – from a broad range of sources on various platforms – does come with a potential to increase information diversity, encompassing new actors, new voices, and new perspectives that potentially can enrich the structural conditions of the public sphere. Seen from that perspective, platforms are potential drivers of change towards a more transnational, interconnected, and integrated world (Volkmer, 2003). However, a growing body of interdisciplinary research suggests that platforms also contribute to fragmentation, polarisation, lack of trust, and alienation of the citizenry (Bennet & Livingston, 2018; Kossowska et al., 2023) – what we, as editors of this special issue, have labelled “digital disintegration”.

We understand digital disintegration as a process that manifests itself across technological and social, as well as political and cultural, dimensions (e.g., Galtung, 1996; Kossowska et al., 2023). While algorithmic content recommendation systems may help people more easily navigate abundant information flows online, concerns have been raised that they may also contribute negatively to information diversity, prioritising content that corresponds to the worldviews and ideological preferences of individual users. In addition to benefits such as facilitating public debate and mobilisation, the infrastructure of social platforms has proved to fuel polarisation (Yarchi et al., 2023), uncivility (Krzyżanowski et al., 2021), and negative affective language use (Ekman, 2019), making democracies increasingly vulnerable and where citizens are subject to self-censorship (Powers et al., 2019). As a consequence, this might lead to increased suspicion among the citizenry, lack of social trust, and a weakening of democratic institutions (Bennet & Livingston, 2018).

Today’s citizens find themselves in a hybrid information environment where the boundaries of journalism, political communication, and strategic (dis)information have become increasingly blurred. Digital platforms can be considered shared infrastructures of communication (Jungherr & Schroeder, 2021) that challenge established notions of media and politics as separate systems. All these aspects raise new questions concerning relationships between communicating actors, citizens, and how we should study, label, and understand them across countries in the Nordic region and beyond. In an effort to respond to these questions, we arranged an international symposium in November 2022, co-organised by the Digital Human Sciences Hub and the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, and Nordicom, a centre for Nordic media research at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. From a diverse range of paper presentations, eight contributions were accepted for publication in this special issue. They all address the topic of digital disintegration through various empirical perspectives, theoretical lenses, and methodological approaches, with a particular focus on implications for the Nordic region.

We present the articles in this special issue below, according to the three parts described above. The first group of articles explores how party campaigning practices during elections have been affected by digitalisation, hybridisation, and fragmentation. Here, the focus is set on various aspects of digital campaign efforts over time, the impact of populist communication, and the adoption and adaptation of journalistic genres in party communication. The second group draws attention to the role of alternative media, audience fragmentation and polarisation, and self-censorship in digital information environments. The third and final group assesses how journalists in legacy media navigate various democratic deliberative norms when interacting with their readers and moderating discussions online, and the consequences digitalisation has had on sourcing practices and source diversity in the news.

Political party communication has undergone rapid developments in the recent decades, pushing political campaigning organisations and strategists to experiment with new genres, formats, and styles, as well as new content circulation strategies to reach voters online. In light of these developments, contemporary research on political communication stresses that party campaigning is increasingly digital, hybrid, and professionalised, emerging in an online ecology characterised by both old and new actors and logics. In addition to the prevailing forms of “mass campaigning”, such as public advertising and televised debates, political messages are also tailored to fit the specific features of various digital platforms. This has become particularly important in order to reach various target groups within the citizenry. Thus, political communication is thereby following the traits of the advertising industry (Strömbäck & Kiousis, 2014).

Adopting campaigning strategies for the digital landscape also challenges the traditional role of political parties within the hybrid media system (Chadwick et al., 2015). For example, data-driven campaigning has led political organisations to strategically adapt to the sociotechnical development where new platforms, actors, and systems emerge and fade over time. Following this development, political actors have become media actors themselves (Ekman & Widholm, 2022), and digital tools, such as social media, are integrated into campaign practices and organisations, shaping political campaigning in new ways (Veneti et al., 2022). This also points to the importance of strategic considerations and decisions that political organisations need to consider over time, impacting the way campaigns are planned and implemented (Kefford et al., 2022). The adoption and adaptation of political communication to various forms and platforms reflect a broader “platformisation” of political communication (Gorwa, 2019). This implies that campaigning efforts compete for attention and impact in a hybrid media system characterised by information abundance, where voter groups are fragmented along demographic and other measurable dimensions. Hence, political actors must manage an array of both established online platforms as well as experiment with new and emerging ones in order to follow suit in the competitive race for voters’ attention.

In the first article, “Second thoughts on digital-first: Exploring the development of election campaigning among Swedish political parties, 2010–2022”, Niklas Bolin, Marie Grusell, and Lars Nord offer a longitudinal perspective on political communication in Swedish election campaigns from a political-party perspective. The article contributes new knowledge on parties’ strategic considerations about digital media across four election campaigns. Drawing on a combination of interviews and party surveys with all political parties then represented in the Swedish parliament, their analysis reveals that parties gradually integrate digital features into their organisations and campaign strategies. The analysis shows that party adaptation to new communication channels has been an evolutionary process, but that the political potentials of new communication tools have generally been overestimated by the political parties. The analysis also shows that parties took a pragmatic approach in tandem with an increased awareness of the complexity of managing data-driven campaigning.

An interesting finding by Bolin, Grusell, and Nord is that, even if the parties’ use of digital media has become more strategic over time, digital media are generally perceived as less important than other communication channels. This result points to the prevalence of more traditional media logics related to legacy media’s centrality for political discourse. Another important finding is related to the strategic utilisation of platforms. Whereas Facebook and party websites have been consistently important during the twelve years, YouTube and Instagram have become increasingly important. In contrast to YouTube and Instagram, Twitter (now known as X) and blogs have over time been perceived as less important. Bolin, Grusell, and Nord’s article reveals that parties view the implementation of digital campaigning pragmatically – and that the process of adaptation is not linear, as the importance of communication channels varies across time.

In addition to the impact of hybridisation and professionalisation of election campaigning, research suggests that social media platforms have also facilitated and benefitted populist actors, compared with traditional political actors (e.g., Engesser et al., 2017; Krämer, 2017; Moffitt, 2016). Populist messages, such as anti-elite statements, varying construction of “the people” versus out-groups (Reinemann et al., 2017), but also criticism aimed at legacy media seem to suit the platform features of social media (Ekman & Widholm, 2023). Researchers have proposed that there is an “elective affinity” between social media and political populism, asserting that the former “have favoured populist against establishment movements by providing the former a suitable channel to invoke the support of ordinary people against the latter” (Gerbaudo, 2018: 746). By drawing attention to the specific platform features, research shows that populist actors have been more successful in managing the logics underpinning the spreadability of online content (Maurer, 2022), thus making a greater impact compared with conventional political actors. Typical traits of populist communication, such as negative and affective political styles, also seem to generate more engagement compared with more conventional political communication (Larsson, 2020; Schwartz et al., 2022). Therefore, political campaigning involving populist actors calls for more detailed scrutiny of the impact and effects that populist communication carries, particularly in relation to conventional non-populist communication.

The second article, “What makes the difference? Social media platforms and party characteristics as contextual factors for political parties’ use of populist political communication in Norway”, by Melanie Magin, Anders Olof Larsson, Eli Skogerbø, and Hedvig Tønnesen, assesses populist political communication on social media in the 2021 Norwegian national election campaign. In their contribution, the authors explore how, and to what degree, three platforms and party characteristics affected the use of populist communication in the election campaign. The study builds on a content analysis of posts published by nine political parties on their official Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts during the final four weeks of the election campaign. The analysis shows that the use of populist communication was relatively rare among all parties, including the right-wing Progress Party. Parties to the fringe left and right side of the political spectrum tended to use more populist communication, but the populist content differed between the two sides. Left-wing parties used anti-elitism to a greater extent, and only the right-wing Progress Party used exclusion of out-groups in their communication. Magin, Larsson, Skogerbø, and Tønnesen make an important contribution and call for a more nuanced assessment of populism in political campaigning. Populism must also be scrutinised with a focus on what type of populist communication could be viewed as problematic for democracy – this points to the fact that research on populism can not only be conducted from a centrist or liberal position.

Experimenting with new styles and formats during elections is a consequence of increasingly platform-driven digital campaigning practices and organisations. The hybridisation of political communication implies that the previously distinct logics and practices of media and politics are becoming gradually blurred. These transformations challenge the previously separate roles of politics and (legacy) media respectively, since digital technologies “enable individuals and collectives to plug themselves into the news making process” (Chadwick et al., 2015: 14). The emergence of politicised news formats, sometimes described in terms such as alternative or hyperpartisan media, capture some of these amalgamations of news and politics on a more general level. A prominent example of this is the alignment between the political agenda of alternative media outlets and political parties, visible in various national contexts (Mayerhöffer & Schwartz, 2020). However, the blurred boundaries between news and politics are also observable in the way party campaigning is organised and implemented. A new palpable element of political communication strategies is the adaptation of news genres by political parties and politicians. Parties increasingly produce information that utilises the blurred boundaries between news, journalism, and political communication. Political parties are investing resources in the production and circulation of news on various platforms, reflecting new forms of strategic communication during elections, as well as in the form of more permanent campaigns (Ekman & Widholm, 2022). Some of these projects do not only disclose the implementation of unconventional campaign strategies but seek to obscure the connection to the party. The adaptation of news forms as strategic political campaigning devices may therefore challenge citizens’ understanding of what constitutes news, journalism, and partisan political messages.

The third article, “Political communication as television news: Party-produced news of the Sweden Democrats during the 2022 election campaign”, is authored by the special issue editors, Mattias Ekman and Andreas Widholm, who examine how political campaigning that draws on television news forms utilises the increasingly blurred boundaries between news journalism and politics online. The article focuses on Riks, a digital television news channel that was produced by the far-right political party, the Sweden Democrats, and distributed on You-Tube and other platforms. Drawing on a mixed methods approach, Ekman and Widholm reveal how Riks blends various news genres in order to strategically favour policies and representatives of the party. Utilising the label “conservative news provision”, Riks simultaneously obscures its connection to the party. The article shows that Riks is an example of a broadened repertoire of strategic political communication that disintegrates established boundary constituents between journalism and partisan information online. The study expands upon established scholarly conceptualisations of alternative media and hyperpartisan news and proposes the concept of “parasitic news” to capture this phenomenon analytically (Ekman & Widholm, 2022).

Over the last decade, alternative media has become an increasingly prevalent topic within journalism and political communication research. However, in contrast to previous generations of researchers, who often approached alternative media from a normative lens, pointing to its democratic potential to cover areas and perspectives neglected by so-called mainstream media (Atton, 2002), a non-normative approach has now become increasingly dominant within alternative media scholarship. The non-normative approach has entailed a heightened focus on how alternative media themselves define their activities, including various degrees of “alternativeness” across several dimensions (Holt et al., 2019). Examples include comparative examinations of differences between traditional and alternative media in terms of content and sourcing, their modes of financing, or how they are defined and perceived by political actors and the broader citizenry (Cushion, 2023).

Most alternative media outlets can be defined as political alternative media (Strömbäck, 2023). This means that, even though they take on the self-perceived role of being correctives to actors representing dominant values in a given media system (Holt et al., 2019), they typically adopt divergent ideological positions to fulfil this role. As such, politicised media production has gained increased influence, as has the significance of audience fragmentation, including the formation of so-called counterpublics across political lines, especially on social media platforms (Kaiser & Rauchfleisch, 2019).

In the fourth article, “Curators of digital counterpublics: Mapping alternative news environments in Sweden and Denmark”, Eva Mayerhöffer, Jakob Bæk Kristensen, and Tim Ramsland map and compare over 20,000 social media accounts that have shared Swedish and Danish alternative news over a three-year period. An important background of their study is that Sweden and Denmark, while being similar in terms of media system characteristics, differ concerning the influence of alternative media. This is because far-right positions were largely marginalised in the Swedish political system and within legacy media, while cooperation between liberal and/or conservative and far-right parties were introduced and normalised much earlier in Denmark (Heft et al., 2020). Unlike the majority of previous studies in the Nordic region, Mayerhöffer, Bæk Kristensen, and Ramsland make a novel contribution by examining a broad array of platforms and actors, taking into account 47 alternative news sites including right- and left-wing orientations, and how their content is shared on Facebook, Twitter (X), YouTube, Telegram, 4chan, reddit, Gap, and Vkontakte. Their analysis of this complex alternative news environment points to how various news curators impinge on the diffusion of content online, contributing to the formation of networked digital counterpublics with various ideological leanings. Likewise, the article reveals considerable differences between Sweden and Denmark regarding the digital curation of alternative news, and between the curation of left-wing and right-wing alternative content.

Audience fragmentation is, on the one hand, an outcome of the diversification of the media landscape towards a high-choice information environment. This diversification forces citizens to become more selective due to the abundance of available content sources online. With an increasing number of niche media, including alternative media with varying political orientations, it has never been easier for individual citizens to select content that corresponds to their own political preferences or interests. On the other hand, audience fragmentation can paradoxically also be seen as an expression of a low-choice media environment. This is evident in the sense that social media platforms play an increasingly central role for news consumption, where algorithmic gatekeepers tailor the news experience for each user individually in ways that are impossible to fully grasp or control (Wallace, 2018). Both these tendencies often spark worry concerning audience fragmentation and polarisation, pointing to the risk that citizens are drawn into politicised spheres of online consumption and participation. However, current research paints a relatively critical picture of this phenomenon internationally (Bruns, 2019). Some suggest that audience formations are best understood in terms of duplication rather than fragmentation, due to considerable overlaps between the media diets of various groups (Webster & Ksiazek, 2012). In addition, studies suggest that there are important differences between audience formations, depending on media system characteristics and the degree of political polarisation in the electorate and political system (Fletcher & Nielsen, 2017).

In the fifth article of this special issue, “American media, Scandinavian audiences: Contextual fragmentation and polarisation among Swedes and Norwegians engaging with American politics”, Jessica Yarin Robinson delves into this research area and explores the media sharing habits of Twitter users in Sweden and Norway in connection with the 2020 American presidential election. Her findings support the duplication thesis, showing a considerable overlap in the media outlets used in the studied networks. However, by isolating the structural factors influencing media fragmentation and polarisation, she concludes that Swedish and Norwegian audiences adopted “American-like patterns of polarisation”, with English-language networks (Swedes and Norwegians posting in English) being more polarised than those tweeting in Swedish or Norwegian. Hence, Robinson illustrates the need for further platform studies that take transnational flows of information and such polarising spill over effects into account.

The tendencies toward a more polarised and disintegrative political climate in democracies worldwide cannot be reduced to merely the effects of digital platforms. On the contrary, they are often rooted in social and political divides, sometimes with a long history that dates back far beyond the existence of digital media (Carothers & O’Donohue, 2019). There is no doubt, however, that social media platforms and digital media have changed the communicative dimensions of polarisation, including its effects on people in their daily lives. Polarisation can be understood three-fold, as suggested by Yarchi, Baden, and Kligler-Vilenchik (2021). Interactional polarisation reflects processes of user fragmentation, for example, the tendency to interact with like-minded people (in Facebook groups or other curated content flows), while avoiding debate with those with opposing views. Positional polarisation refers instead to the increase of antagonistic and extreme political preferences, whereby the ideological distance between opponents increases. This tendency is reflected in the populist and authoritarian turn in many countries (Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Such views can be normalised in interactive spaces that lack diversity and where individual opinion leaders have a strong impact on the political discourse (Ekman, 2019). This, in turn, ties into affective polarisation, which includes increased hostility, uncivility, and at worst, hate speech (Yarchi et al., 2021).

The constant pushing of boundaries concerning deliberative norms, away from constructive conversations and respect for opposing views, is key to understanding questions of self-censorship. Self-censorship may have negative effects on democracy, since it undermines citizen participation. This question is addressed in the sixth article of this special issue, “Between civic virtue and vice: Self-censorship of political views on social media among Norwegian youth”, authored by Lukas Mozdeika, who explores how people express their rationale for self-censorship online, drawing on interviews with young adults of various political and ethnic backgrounds. His article addresses the limitations and risks that people perceive when expressing their opinions online, and the strategies they employ to minimise these risks in relation to their political and cultural identities. By critically examining concepts such as lurking, inhibition, and self-limitation, Mozdeika shows that individuals holding progressive political identities tend to internalise their reactions by withdrawing and avoiding confrontations. In contrast, conservatives are more inclined to practise self-censorship based on the assumption that actual censorship exists. Mozdeika’s findings warrant further studies, not least in a Nordic comparative setting.

Journalism has long been seen as a key institution for democracy, serving as an arena for political information, critical scrutiny of elected representatives and other powerholders, and public debate (Christians et al., 2010). The journalistic and democratic challenges identified by researchers may at the same time differ, depending on what type of democracy they refer to, and particularly what roles they ascribe to the relation between journalists and citizens. The field of journalism studies has been significantly influenced by the deliberative model of democracy, drawing substantial inspiration from Habermas’s concept of the public sphere (Strömbäck, 2005). The normative traits of deliberative democracy position citizens at the heart of the democratic process, not only in terms of voting but also as active participants engaging in dialogue – deliberation – about common societal concerns in the public sphere (Susen, 2017). At the same time, the deliberative model of democracy underscores that deliberation should be guided by specific norms such as facticity, rationality, honesty, and equality between actors involved, because such norms may generate mutual understanding and respect for different ideological positions. Moreover, these norms can help facilitate agreements and resolve conflicts through consensus-building, thereby enhancing a democratic spirit within the citizenry (Chambers, 2018).

Digitalisation and hybridisation have enabled new forms of deliberation within journalism, as digital platforms allow for a greater degree of interactivity. User comments, sometimes referred to as “annotative reporting” (Springer et al., 2015), can be understood as a distinctive type of textual hybridity, where viewpoints from readers constitute an extension of the news narrative that provides additional information and a broader context. At best, such comments reflect vivid deliberation, where different standpoints to various issues are presented and discussed in honest and respectful ways. When news commenting takes place in social media, it can also serve as a powerful editorial tool that can be used to trigger algorithmic recommendation systems to enhance the circulation of the news (Lee & Tandoc, 2017), sometimes also resulting in more loyal readers and enduring news consumption patterns (Lischka & Messerli, 2016). The downside of this development, however, is that audience participation also involves actions that break with deliberative norms. Uncivility, racism, hate speech, strategic lies, and increased threats against journalists constitute core challenges that have forced legacy media companies to develop new content moderation techniques – in manual as well as automated versions (Wang, 2021). Hence, conflicting narratives among user comments may pose a challenge to journalism’s ability to uphold ideals of facticity and verification in the news.

In the seventh article, “Online discussion threads as promoters of citizen democracy: Current opportunities and challenges for small- and medium-sized media organisations in Finland”, Klas Backholm, Heini Ruohonen, and Kim Strandberg analyse how Finnish journalists use and navigate various deliberative norms when interacting with their readers and moderating discussions online. Drawing on interviews with managers as well as journalists, they shed new light not only on content moderation as a particular professional practice, but also on how it can be applied to promote democratically sustainable discussions. Their analysis points to various ways in which citizens can be invited to participate, yet there are several obstacles for this to occur, with uncivil “contamination” of commenting sections being the most pressing one. Systematic scrutiny of uncivil comments demands considerable resources, which can be costly, especially for smaller media organisations with slimmed budgets. Another problem concerns the lack of diversity of opinions and representativeness, as only a small minority of the citizenry is active in discussion threads, something that is also addressed in Mozdeika’s article in this special issue. Similar to many other scholars who have warned against overly optimistic views on participatory practices, Backholm, Ruohonen, and Strandberg, in their contribution to this special issue, find that the challenges associated with discussion threads may outweigh the benefits for democracy. Ensuring a sustainable financial situation for small local newspapers and developing new ways to engage a broad range of readers seem key to furthering the deliberative potential of journalism in the digital age.

The digitalisation of the public sphere has sparked expectations of a more heterogeneous and pluralist space of voices and actors. The facilitation of information, including news, by online platforms and spaces has sometimes been associated with notions of strengthening democratisation and deliberation within societies. These expectations have also included the role of legacy media, for example, through the possibilities of advancing diversity in journalistic sourcing practices, providing voice to a new and more diversified set of actors (Lecheler & Kruikemeier, 2016; Van Leuven et al., 2018). The access to a plethora of new (and old) sources online has potentially challenged the centrality of elite sources in the news. This has led to expectations of a transformation of sourcing practices within legacy media, adapting to the logics and actors of the hybrid media system. The adaptation to online sources poses new challenges for legacy media, for example, in validating the trustworthiness of online sources or determining the origin of information circulating in the profusion of information flows online (Picha Edwardsson et al., 2023). As yet, research shows that sourcing is part of deeply routinised practices within journalism, and the emergence of digital sources does not seem to change the power balance between type of sources over time: Elite sources are still dominant in the news (Barnoy & Reich, 2021).

In the eighth and final article, “Enduring elites in quoted sources: Institutional alignment in Finnish media, 1999–2018”, Olli Seuri, Anu Koivunen, Henna Levola, and Eetu Mäkelä pose the question of whether, and if so how, the sourcing practices of journalistic news media have been transformed by the transition to online-first publishing and the hybridisation of the media system. Offering a longitudinal analysis of sources in four Finnish news outlets from 1999 to 2018, including a broadsheet newspaper, a news agency, a tabloid newspaper, and a public broadcaster, all articles (1.4 million) published in the period are assessed, using both automated and manual methods. Seuri, Koivunen, Levola, and Mäkelä show that even if the number of sources increased over time, due to access to more information online, this does not affect the power balance between the types of sources. There are no signs of a diversification of sources in the news, despite access to seemingly unlimited actors online. Instead, the routinisation of journalistic sourcing practices seems to prevail, as the analysis shows a concentration and consolidation of sources from those same institutions traditionally relied upon. The authors term this condition “institutional alignment”, where, for example, elite sources dominate in political news and the routinised use of easily accessible sources is still a prevalent feature of journalism, also within the hybrid media system.

All of the contributions in this special issue provide valuable empirical insights, along with new lines of thinking concerning digital and disintegrative transformations in the Nordic region and beyond. As editors of this special issue, we encourage further research into the practices and consequences associated with digital disintegration, as well as the democratic challenges linked to dissolving boundaries and platformisation in the new hybrid information environment.