Social news websites are online newspapers edited by their readers. They filter previously published material according to the public opinion of users, and thereby present a compilation of media output that supposedly represents public opinion better, and in a more egalitarian way, than the contents of any single media organ. (Example: Digg, Reddit or Newsvine.)
Social news sites are able to take advantage of the professional resources of established, mainstream media, and to combine this with alternative, citizen media (non-professional blogs etc.), in order to cover the news from many points of view, thereby revealing the bias or distortion of individual media organs.
My study proposes to give a comprehensive account of social news sites, and their role in democracy, taking a Habermasian model of deliberative democracy as a background.
In a deliberative democracy, political decisions are supposed to be the outcome of careful, rational discussion among citizens. Face-to-face deliberation can work in small groups; but it is impossible even in theory to envisage a situation where every single citizen would get together and discuss about political issues (this might actually be detrimental to the deliberatory process). Society-wide deliberation can only be mediated deliberation, played out in the public sphere by the media. For Habermas, the principal role of the media (and, in his understanding, especially the role of the nationwide, broadsheet press) is to transform the communicative power of citizens into political power.
The role of the public sphere (and consequently, the role of journalism) is especially important in the case of political decisions that are made outside of the political system, i.e. in the case of referendums and elections, when the actual decisions are not going to be made by politicians, but by the citizens themselves. These decisions can only be accepted as legitimate to the extent that actors of the public sphere guarantee that voters cast their votes based on the previous deliberation of the issue at hand.
And this is why social news sites are important. They hold the promise of becoming a player in the public sphere that can provide citizens with normatively better media output – that is, in our case, media output that is more conducive to society wide deliberation. My research sets out to decide, upon empirical evidence, whether this promise is actualized or not.
