Democracia, ciberativismo e redes sociais digitais: mudanças na participação política no século XXI

Abstract

A liberal democracy has historically lived with a dilemma about political representation, which impacts on the cohesion of the system. This crisis, however, has deepened in the most current countries in the face of economic and social problems experienced by an increasingly globalized international system. In that sense, theorists of democracy work to offer ways to overcome this dilemma. With the advent of the Internet and its popularization, at the end of the 20th century, expectations were placed in the sense of using it to bring together representatives of those represented, expanding the possibilities of political participation. Shortly thereafter, social media appear, connecting people from all over the world in a fast, agile and inexpensive way. In this context, economic and social crises go deeper and movements of contestation, composed of users connected by these social platforms, leave the virtual environment to occupy real urban spaces in the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, etc. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze, based on the literature review on the crisis of liberal democracy and on the internet, cyberactivism and platforms, the effect of new ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies), in especially social media, for political participation. In this perspective, it is possible to determine if the public space, promoted in these social networks, favors reliable and fair political participation or if these platforms, in the pursuit of profit, misrepresent the debate with their algorithms, forming echo chambers and allowing the dissemination of fake news, negatively affecting the democratic political system.