This lecture draws from the radical-democratic tradition and critical theory to critique social media from the perspective of the demos.

Popular Platforms: Toward a Radical Democratic Theory of Social Media

Recent evaluations of social media in democratic theory have predominantly invoked deliberative ideals. Taking a different stance, this lecture draws normatively from the radical-democratic tradition and methodologically from critical theory to produce a critique of social media from the perspective of the demos.

Working immanently from popular practices as they manifest on contemporary platforms, I reconstruct four unrealized radical-democratic potentialities in social media:

Participation: platforms promise inclusion, yet engage only a fraction of the population.

Autonomy: they promise spaces of freedom, yet remain shaped by states and markets.

Resistance: they enable popular expression, yet remain distant from power and vulnerable to elite manipulation.

Political action: they can carry politics beyond institutions, yet often produce fleeting rather than lasting forms of democratic action.

Building productively on these contradictions, the lecture finally sketches out a novel regulative ideal: that of “popular platforms.” While the emancipatory potentialities of social media remain clouded by social, economic, and political domination, the horizon also portends a future in which social media serve to reconcile democracy with the demos.

About the speaker

Antoine Sander is a postdoctoral scholar at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights. An empirically minded political theorist, his research explores how technological artefacts (re)configure democratic politics. Antoine specializes in radical democratic thought, the political theory of technology, critical media studies, empirical methods in political theory, and the history of 20th century political thought

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