To Build a Better Democracy, Start by Rethinking Your Relationship to the Internet

Ivan Sigal is an advisor, strategist, and writer working in media, civics, technology, information, human rights, and the arts. He was executive director of Global Voices for 16 years.

The sound and fury about the capitulation of US technology and media leaders to President Donald Trump has obscured elemental human truths: each of us controls how we use our voices and how we direct our attention. These truths, proclaimed universal, inalienable rights in international declarations and many state constitutions, are lost if we forget they are ours. And too often in recent years, many of us, caught in the amnesia of our endless scrolling, seem to have forgotten.

It is worth remembering that even having a debate about free expression and access to information is a significant marker of liberty. In too many countries around the world, powerful individuals and institutions control discourse through co-optation and coercion, funneling citizens into controlled mediums and stifling the exchange of thought and ideas. This is the essence of authoritarian behavior: to remove choice over what people see, hear, and know.

However, if you are reading this, you likely live in a country where your rights to expression are protected—at least nominally and for the moment. You probably still have the power to make decisions about your relationship to information and communications. Yet more than 5 billion people around the world have voluntarily outsourced aspects of these rights to corporate-owned social media platforms, Google’s search engine, and AI chat tools, handing that power to applications that facilitate and mediate their social networks and their relationship to information. Many of us have likely done so without giving it much thought, perhaps forgetting the insight of the writers David Weinberger and Doc Searls, who observed, more than a decade ago, that the “The Net's super-power is connection without permission.”

Now, when rights and freedoms in an increasing number of countries are under threat from populist and authoritarian governments, reclaiming agency over your information and communications practices is a necessary precursor to other kinds of action. It is the first step in rooting polities in factual evidence and accurate information toward an invigorated democratic governance. It is a first act in repairing and affirming communities on the basis of mutual support, consideration and curiosity, frank discussion, and generosity of spirit.

Epistemic Fracture

It is well established that the mainstream social media technologies that focus on social networking and information sharing employ opaque algorithms to shape what people see and share. Built around an endless feed of information, they reframe humans as “users,” transform relationships into transactions, and privilege the passive consumption of sensational media over interaction and understanding. This architecture rewards and encourages superficial engagement and serves the interests of malign actors who benefit, commercially and politically, from polarized thinking and sensational, inaccurate content.

These are not new observations, though their implications are debated and often misunderstood. An important consequence is epistemic fracture—the broken relationship between information and its source. This dynamic was extensively documented in 2018 by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts in the book Network Propaganda regarding the creation and effects of what was then called the alt-right and is now the mainstream US right-wing media ecosystem. In their telling, ideologically aligned media distort facts, filter them through framing narratives, and promote and amplify them on social media channels primed for sensation and conflict to present falsehoods as truth.

Likewise, my colleagues and I at the civic media reporting, research, and advocacy organization Global Voices spent the last six years documenting how the creation, organization, and sharing of information shapes public understanding in dozens of countries. One of our primary conclusions is that it is increasingly difficult, even for professional researchers, to trace claims about facts back to their origins. In the absence of evidentiary legibility, people face the disorientation that comes from being isolated from facts. Hannah Arendt defined this epistemic “loneliness” as a hallmark of totalitarianism. It is today a condition familiar to the many people living under authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Hong Kong, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Myanmar, and a condition being increasingly discovered in democratic countries with populist, reactionary governments slipping towards authoritarianism, such as India, Turkey, and the US.

Too often, contemporary social media exacerbate this condition. A trenchant recent example: Andy Carvin, known for live-tweeting the Arab uprisings while a journalist at NPR, asked Grok 3, X’s AI agent, whether the kind of “real-time, crowdsourced journalism” he did on Twitter in 2011 would still be possible on the X of 2025. The answer was an unequivocal no: “Twitter was your partner then, X’s a foe now… Noise drowns your updates, mistrust taints your network, fragmentation snaps your flow, and limits choke your volume.”

The online life, reexamined

When your rights and freedoms are at stake, reevaluating your relationship to information and communication is a necessity, not a lifestyle choice. And a first step toward asserting more agency over your own life? Reexamine how you live your life online: ask yourself what you want to achieve with your communications and begin reordering it accordingly.

The decision to reorganize one’s relationship with mediating technologies—including mass media like cable television and especially Big Tech products like social media—is an opportunity to reimagine how we invest our time and cultivate relationships with others. Except in the most authoritarian of countries, people are not forced to watch and consume information against their will, even if the ubiquitous screens appended to public life in many countries—from billboards to taxi and airplane seats to gasoline pumps—shove an endless stream of noise at us, and make it seem that we are.

The costs of changing our relationships with technology platforms may seem prohibitive. Many people spend significant time and effort maintaining online relationships and perceive real benefits from access to large communities and the reach of networks at scale. They may fear the financial or professional consequences of leaving. Some want to continue asserting facts and pro-rights narratives in large forums. But remaining in thrall to dominant tech platforms has its own cost: the cognitive load and emotional strain required to navigate and parse the constant distraction of sensational content, to disentangle some degree of truth from a snarl of false and distorted narratives, and to remain captive to an internet model based on surveillance and corporate control of our data.

Stepping away from the dominant communications platforms does not necessarily mean rejecting modern information technologies, and it doesn’t mean revalidating the mass media that functioned as information gatekeepers and cultural and political influencers in the 20th century. It also doesn’t mean endorsing deterministic claims about the effects of abundant information and connection on our brains. Instead, it means asking whether the tools we use to express ourselves might reflexively shape us in ways we do not intend or desire. It means insisting that information technology serves human agency and asking which tools are fit for purpose in a given context.

It is also important to state that even without mediating technologies, people still have real and serious disagreements about how to live and what to value. Living in democratic societies means we aim to manage conflicts without censorship or violence. It is precisely for these types of conversations that we can make considered choices about which forums might best serve the end of managing disagreements.

How to kick an internet bad habit

There are many ways people can reclaim control over information access and expression without abstaining entirely, though turning off our devices and meeting or gathering in person with friends and neighbors has immense benefits. Internet publics too can and should organize their own spaces to have conversations in whatever form they want, with the degree of technological augmentation, privacy, and norms they need.

From the small, simple acts of finding and recognizing can emerge new possibilities for creativity, action, and organizing. This may seem like a formidable collective action challenge, but there are methods for easing the transfer of social networks from one platform to another, such as the starter packs on Bluesky or Mastodon or tactical cross-posting on several platforms. There is also a simple pleasure in revisiting the lists of people you have met and followed over the years and reaching out to people for a conversation or a suggestion as to where you can be found. Any resulting collective action organized on the basis of stronger initial relationships can pay off in the creation of more resilient networks.

In the history of the internet, myriad examples of thriving alternative spaces demonstrate how we might organize our information and communications spaces differently. Beyond the obvious example of Wikipedia, there are many internet-based communities, media, and applications that incorporate hybrid editorial, community, and archival behaviors. For example, Global Voices, which I had the privilege to support as executive director for 16 years, is an organization that supports local writers, researchers, and translators in Global Majority countries to collectively tell stories that matter to their communities for global audiences. Being part of that community has allowed me to access energy, creativity, and productive arguments in an environment of trust and friendship fostered by people working together to build and sustain a shared asset.

There are thousands of other initiatives, hyperlocal news sites, topic-specific journals, conversation spaces, and collectives scattered across the internet, archiving personal and communal histories, organizing citizen science, mapping trails and byways, compiling rights documentation, or organizing emergency and humanitarian response communities. Watch Duty, a recent, prominent example, organizes the collective knowledge and networks of emergency response, weather, and fire experts to collectively track and document wildfires across the Western US. Open Street Map has supported a flourishing of community-directed mapping and wayfinding. Smalltown is a platform designed specifically for small communities to build collaborative spaces.

To counter the challenge of mass surveillance driven by the marriage of corporate power and governments hostile to civic rights and freedoms, we can turn to spaces that facilitate privacy in our communications and use tools that privilege security and obscurity, and let people control their own data. As much as possible, working on platforms built on open protocols such as federated, decentralized social networks will signal to technologists that there is a demand for privacy-forward tools that privilege human agency and thereby hasten their maturity. At present the best of these technologies attract millions of people, but are still nowhere near their mass market competitors. For instance, in 2024, Signal had 70 million active users, while the anonymizing browser Tor had more than 8.4 million daily users.

Other technologies support user-controlled moderation and community-shaping functions and prioritize learning and exploration. In An Illustrated Guide to Social Media, scholars Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman have done us a service in articulating the varied logics that social media platforms adopt. Many conversations are still best held in public forums, but a choice to prioritize those platforms, like the many Mastodon instances that allow for significant user or moderator control, could also help them to establish the network effects they need to attract more users and the funding and technical expertise to become enduring parts of our information architectures. Other discussions might be better served on platforms organized around “civic logics” that facilitate some social end. The Civic Tech Field Guide provides a directory for hundreds of projects, such as the discussion platform Kialo or Loomio for collective decision-making.

The choice is yours

Choosing to use platforms that have transparent rules, provide for user agency to reduce noise and improve information discoverability, and support data portability is our best chance to improve information integrity.

For those who want or need to remain on large commercial social platforms but hope to reduce their attention capture, maximizing personal controls such as vigorously employing blockers, building lists, restricting followers, and activating privacy controls can, with effort, sometimes still yield a functional experience. Employing a browser plug-in such as the News Feed Eradicator, for example, removes the endless scrolling of Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn, such that the user has to visit a person’s profile to see their content. That simple trick reduced my Facebook use by 90 percent and turned the platform into a facsimile of a phonebook.

For the past 15 years, the Internet as a communications and information tool has been dominated by an organizational structure and vision of scale that primarily benefits centralized, mediating platforms and places people's interests below those of corporate shareholders and clients. But the apparent collective dependencies of people can shift, if enough of us start to take the small, crucial steps to direct our attention elsewhere. What may seem like an addiction may only be a bad habit. And this change, for many of us, can happen today—with no rewriting of policy or law and no coercive power. And if enough of us act, we will create the demand signal that builders of technologies that privilege human agency need to validate their work.

This approach is not a silver bullet to magically fix what’s broken with our information ecosystems, but nothing is. Instead, it’s joining those on a long journey to rebuild our communications relationships to privilege the interest of people over companies, to reestablish the integrity of our information sources, and to scale our networks concomitant with the capacities of our attentions. We have only to pause, lift our heads from our devices, look around us, and begin.