If you mean "direct democracy" by "technically democratic" then you have a point. But direct democracy is totally flawed and rightly no country endorses it. (To

If you mean "direct democracy" by "technically democratic" then you have a point. But direct democracy is totally flawed and rightly no country endorses it. (To make this clear, Switzerland is not a direct democracy, they merely have more plebiscites than other countries.) Real direct democracy would lead to horrible populism, short-sighted and uninformed decision making, and a tyranny of the majority. It would also likely be hijacked in no time by taking over mass media, and turned into a real dictatorship. Representative democracy with minority protections and strong power divisions is way superior and what people mean by "democracy" (at least upon a bit of reflection). I don't see how social media could possibly make representative democracy more democratic. Since the posters who actually know what they're talking about will always be in a small minority, it's hard to see how social media could make voters more informed, for instance. Most posts on social media contain no new information at all, all the information in them is aggregated from traditional media in a usually extremely biased and selective manner. The vast majority of posters employ no journalists, have no correspondents, and do not gather any news of their own. In my opinion, it's important to distinguish between different types of social media, though. Heavily moderated forum-based social media like Reddit and HN make it possible to have halfway civil discussions, although the amount of noise and misinformation can still be high. I personally consider them relatively neutral or only slightly negative for democracy. They are good for finding like-minded people interested in niche topics, which can be good or bad depending on the topic. Social media like Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, seem to have no positive effect at all. Their rules of conduct basically enforce and select for passive aggressive posts and intellectual insults. It's unbearable for everyone involved and merely makes everyone more aggressive until they have customized their feeds so much that they create echo chambers. Such social media systems polarize a lot, even more so than traditional media.