How Social Media Affects Democracy: TikTok, AI, Algorithms and the New Public Sphere
In 2020, I wrote my final Media Studies research paper at UC Berkeley around a question that already felt huge:
How does social media affect democracy?
I kept coming back to three ideas: the public sphere, surveillance and political influence.
Facebook was still dealing with the fallout from Cambridge Analytica. Twitter had become inseparable from American politics. TikTok was exploding. Influencers were becoming real cultural power brokers. Algorithms were quietly deciding which posts reached millions of people and which disappeared.
I remember sitting with all of that and thinking we were entering a completely different media environment.
Six years later, I realize 2020 was basically the intro.
TikTok is now a regular news source for millions of Americans. Influencers increasingly sit alongside journalists in people's information diets. Recommendation systems personalize enormous portions of what we see. Generative AI can create convincing images, voices and videos in seconds.
Meanwhile, my own relationship with social media changed too.
I went from studying platforms in a Berkeley classroom to working in digital media, building a brand and becoming a creator on the same platforms I had once analyzed academically.
I have watched my own videos suddenly travel to millions of people because viewers laughed, replayed, commented, shared or sent them to friends.
Seeing that happen from inside the system changed the question for me.
My argument today is more specific than the one I made in college:
Social media's most important democratic power comes from its ability to organize visibility: deciding what reaches us, what repeats, who becomes credible and which version of public reality each of us encounters.
The biggest political influence of social media rarely feels political while it is happening.
Usually, it feels like scrolling.
How Does Social Media Affect Democracy?
Social media affects democracy by shaping political information, public attention, voter communication, civic participation and the visibility of competing ideas.
Democracy requires some shared infrastructure for communication.
People need ways to understand what is happening around them. They need access to different perspectives. They need spaces where they can debate public issues, challenge institutions, organize and eventually decide what they believe.
Social media dramatically expanded that access.
Someone witnessing an injustice can document it before a television crew arrives.
An activist can speak directly to thousands of people.
A local issue can become nationally visible overnight.
A politician can communicate directly with voters.
A creator can explain legislation from their bedroom and potentially reach more people than a local newspaper.
During most of modern media history, mass communication required infrastructure.
A newspaper needed a printing press.
Television needed broadcasting equipment.
Radio needed access to the airwaves.
Today, someone needs a phone.
That change is genuinely democratic.
It also creates a new problem.
Once almost everyone has the ability to speak, who controls who gets heard?
That is where Media Studies gets interesting.
Social Media Became a New Public Sphere
One concept I kept returning to at Berkeley was the public sphere.
The term is closely associated with German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, whose work explored the spaces where citizens exchange ideas and participate in discussions about public life.
Historically, those spaces included newspapers, cafés, universities, political meetings, television and radio.
Now imagine adding:
TikTok.
Instagram.
YouTube.
Reddit.
X.
Podcasts.
Comment sections.
Group chats.
Livestreams.
And whatever platform Gen Alpha eventually invents that makes the rest of us feel 97 years old.
Social media looks like an enormous expansion of the public sphere because millions of people who once needed institutional permission to reach an audience can now publish directly.
Yet the digital public sphere operates differently from a physical public square.
Imagine walking into a public plaza where every street, billboard and conversation rearranges itself depending on who enters.
The environment recognizes you.
It remembers what caught your attention yesterday.
It predicts what might interest you today.
Then it reorganizes itself again.
That is basically the feed.
The Algorithm Is the Editor You Never Hired
Traditional Media Studies spends a lot of time examining gatekeeping.
Editors, publishers, producers and journalists historically decided which stories became visible to mass audiences.
The internet weakened many of those traditional gates because almost anyone could publish.
Gatekeeping survived.
It became computational.
TikTok has the For You page.
Instagram has Reels and Explore.
YouTube recommends what you should watch next.
Facebook ranks Feed content.
X algorithmically organizes posts.
Publishing became radically open.
Distribution remained selective.
And modern distribution systems know a lot about the audience they are selecting for.
Which video did you finish?
Which one did you skip?
What made you open the comments?
What did you replay?
Who did you follow?
What did you share?
What kept you scrolling for another twenty minutes when you absolutely told yourself you were going to bed?
Every interaction becomes information.
Over time, your feed becomes a prediction of your attention.
Going Viral Changed How I Understand Algorithms
I understood algorithmic distribution academically long before I experienced it personally.
Then one of my dance videos took off.
When my Zesty Sturdy Dance video reached more than 2.3 million views in three days, I watched the mechanics of digital distribution happen in real time.
The choreography mattered.
The caption mattered.
The humor mattered.
People tagging their friends mattered.
Replay value mattered.
The video gave people a reason to react quickly, and those reactions created more opportunities for other people to see it.
Suddenly, theories I had studied at Berkeley felt much less theoretical.
That experience left me with one idea I keep returning to:
The same attention infrastructure that can make a funny dance explode also distributes political information.
TikTok does not suddenly transform into a political science department when the video changes from dancing to elections.
The recommendation system still has to decide what deserves another impression.
And that is where entertainment logic starts colliding with democratic life.
Social Media Algorithms Influence What Politics We See
I am careful with claims about algorithms because "the algorithm controls everyone's brain" is satisfying internet rhetoric and terrible media analysis.
The stronger argument concerns exposure.
Algorithms help determine which issues, speakers and interpretations repeatedly enter someone's field of vision.
A major 2026 study in Nature examined more than 280,000 TikTok recommendations during the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Researchers used controlled accounts conditioned with different partisan signals and found systematic differences in the political material recommended to them. Republican-conditioned accounts received more co-partisan material, while Democratic-conditioned accounts encountered more cross-partisan material, much of it anti-Democratic. The researchers appropriately cautioned that their experiment could demonstrate differences in exposure without identifying every mechanism responsible for those differences.
That distinction is important.
An algorithm does not have to personally convert you into a Republican, Democrat, socialist, libertarian or person who has decided politics is unbearable and only wants cat videos.
Its influence can be quieter.
It can affect what feels important because you keep seeing it.
Media scholars have studied a related concept for decades: agenda-setting.
The basic insight is that media can shape which subjects people consider important even without dictating exactly what they should believe about them.
Algorithmic media creates a personalized version of that problem.
Millions of people no longer open roughly the same newspaper.
Millions of people open feeds built specifically for them.
We Are Increasingly Living on Different Internets
This is one of the strangest things about modern media.
People constantly say:
"Everyone is talking about this."
I always want to know who everyone is.
My feed might contain dance, music, fashion, internet humor, Vietnamese content, creator culture and one completely random person whose apartment renovation I am now emotionally invested in for reasons I cannot explain.
Someone else's feed is politics all day.
Another person's is fitness.
Another person's is finance.
Another person's is conspiracy content.
Someone else has apparently convinced TikTok that their sole purpose on Earth is researching air fryers.
Same platform.
Completely different media environment.
Personalization is obviously useful. Nobody wants every digital experience to contain only irrelevant information.
The democratic consequence is more complicated.
Democracy expects disagreement.
People are supposed to argue over ideas.
The deeper problem begins when those arguments start from dramatically different informational environments.
Your feed presents one issue as the defining crisis of the week.
Mine barely mentions it.
Your feed repeatedly supplies one interpretation.
Mine repeatedly supplies another.
Neither of us necessarily knows how different our information environments have become because personalization is largely invisible to the person experiencing it.
We think we are standing in the same public square.
The architecture says otherwise.
TikTok Turned News Into Something You Can Accidentally Watch
TikTok fascinates me from a Media Studies perspective because it completely collapses categories that older media systems kept separate.
A normal scrolling session might go:
dance video,
breakup story,
skincare ad,
political commentary,
GRWM,
breaking news,
meme,
chicken sandwich ranking,
another dance.
All within a couple of minutes.
That chaotic mixture matters.
News once lived inside recognizable environments.
You opened a newspaper.
You watched the evening broadcast.
You intentionally visited a news website.
On TikTok, political information can appear while someone technically came for entertainment.
And younger audiences are increasingly comfortable with that arrangement.
Pew Research Center reported in 2026 that 20% of U.S. adults regularly get news from TikTok, compared with just 3% in 2020. Among adults ages 18 to 29, that figure reached 43%.
That change happened during roughly the same period between my original Berkeley paper and this updated essay.
Even more interesting is who delivers the news.
Pew's research has found TikTok users encounter information from journalists and news organizations alongside influencers, celebrities and ordinary users.
The categories increasingly overlap.
For a Media Studies major, there is basically an entire thesis hiding inside that sentence.
Because the question becomes:
What happens to authority when somebody who feels like your internet friend explains the news?
Influencers Are Becoming Media Institutions Without Looking Like Institutions
Traditional media authority usually announces itself.
The television anchor has a desk.
The newspaper has a masthead.
The academic has credentials.
The reporter has a byline.
Influencer authority can begin with:
"Okay guys, I need to talk about this."
And weirdly enough, that informality can make the message more persuasive.
Creators develop parasocial relationships with audiences. You watch someone repeatedly. You understand their humor. You recognize their mannerisms. You become familiar with their worldview.
Eventually, they feel familiar.
Familiarity can become trust.
This can be incredibly valuable.
Creators can explain complicated topics in accessible language.
They can introduce audiences to perspectives traditional institutions ignored.
They can make younger people interested in public affairs without making the experience feel like homework.
The risk is just as obvious.
A person can be charismatic, relatable and completely wrong.
I think about that differently now because I have an audience myself.
Millions of views sound abstract until those views belong to something you uploaded.
Then every number becomes a person who received something you created.
Reach is power.
Even silly content taught me that.
When the subject becomes politics, health, money or breaking news, the stakes become much higher.
Three distinctions have become increasingly important to me:
Relatability does not equal expertise.
Confidence does not equal evidence.
Virality is a distribution event, not a truth test.
I genuinely wish that third line appeared above every comment section on the internet.
Why Outrage Travels So Well Online
To understand political content online, you have to understand the attention economy.
Human attention is finite.
Almost everyone on the internet wants a piece of it.
Creators want attention.
Brands want attention.
Journalists want attention.
Politicians want attention.
Advertisers absolutely want attention.
And they increasingly compete inside the exact same feeds.
Imagine a careful six-minute explanation of a complicated policy proposal.
Now put it next to a fifteen-second clip making an outrageous claim in enormous text while dramatic music plays underneath.
Which one stops the scroll?
Exactly.
Platforms learn from behavior.
People watch.
Comment.
Share.
Replay.
Argue.
Send posts to friends.
Emotion creates action, and action creates signals.
I have experienced the harmless version of that through entertainment content.
A funny caption can completely change a video's performance.
A surprising moment creates replay value.
A relatable joke makes someone send the video to their friend.
Those same psychological mechanics exist when the subject becomes ideological.
Fear captures attention.
Anger captures attention.
Moral outrage captures attention.
Identity captures attention.
A recommendation system does not contain a miniature philosophy professor asking whether the most nuanced argument deserves wider distribution.
Sometimes the smarter explanation loses because the louder one understood the medium better.
That is a media problem.
It is also a democratic problem.
Misinformation Has an Infrastructure Problem
Human beings were spreading false information long before Silicon Valley existed.
Social media transformed the speed, scale and infrastructure of misinformation.
One misleading claim can become a video, meme, screenshot, reaction clip, repost and five slightly mutated versions of itself before the original source even responds.
Corrections face an annoying disadvantage.
The correction has to explain.
The false claim only has to be memorable.
The deeper danger emerges when repeated misinformation damages people's confidence in the information environment itself.
Eventually the question shifts from:
"Is this true?"
to:
"Can I trust anything?"
That is an epistemological problem.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge: how we know something, what qualifies as evidence and why certain sources deserve credibility.
That sounds aggressively Berkeley until an AI-generated video lands in the family group chat and suddenly everyone is debating whether an event actually happened.
Then epistemology gets practical very quickly.
AI Deepfakes Are Changing What Evidence Means
For most of my life, the phrase "I'll believe it when I see it" sounded perfectly reasonable.
Visual evidence carried cultural authority.
A photograph felt persuasive.
Audio felt stronger.
Video felt close to definitive.
Generative AI has destabilized that assumption.
Synthetic media can now imitate faces, voices, photographs and events with increasingly convincing results.
A 2026 systematic review of research on political deepfakes found evidence that deepfakes can create confusion and reduce trust in online news and government. Interestingly, the review also found they are not automatically more persuasive than every other type of misinformation.
That nuance matters.
The larger threat may come from uncertainty.
Once everyone understands that convincing fake media exists, authentic media becomes easier to dismiss.
A genuine recording can be called AI.
A real photograph can be dismissed as synthetic.
Authenticity itself becomes debatable.
Scholars sometimes discuss this phenomenon through the liar's dividend: widespread awareness of synthetic media can give people additional opportunities to deny real evidence.
We spent decades improving humanity's ability to document reality.
Now we are rapidly improving our ability to simulate it.
That changes what media literacy has to mean.
Surveillance Capitalism Is Happening in the Background
Surveillance was one of the major ideas in my original 2020 paper.
Digital surveillance sounds dramatic.
In everyday life, it often looks incredibly boring.
A click.
A search.
A pause.
A purchase.
A location signal.
A follow.
A video watched to completion.
A video abandoned after two seconds.
Individually, those behaviors seem meaningless.
Together, they can say a lot about a person.
In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission published an extensive report examining major social media and video-streaming companies. The FTC found that companies collected enormous amounts of personal data and that advertising-based business incentives encouraged mass data collection, including the use of tracking technologies and information from data brokers.
This connects to surveillance capitalism, a concept strongly associated with scholar Shoshana Zuboff.
The basic idea is that human behavior can become data.
Data can become prediction.
Prediction can become commercial value.
Social media creates a particularly fascinating loop:
The platform shows you something.
You react.
The platform observes the reaction.
It adjusts.
Then it shows you something else.
You are consuming media while the media system is simultaneously studying how you consume.
Once you see that relationship, it becomes difficult to unsee.
Social Media Also Makes Us Watch Ourselves
The self-surveillance side of social media feels especially personal to me as a creator.
Before posting something, I automatically start asking:
Does this look good?
Will people understand the joke?
Is the caption strong enough?
Will this flop?
Will somebody screenshot it?
Does this fit my page?
Is this cringe?
Will the algorithm pick it up?
Should I delete it?
Nobody has to physically stand over my shoulder enforcing those rules.
The audience has already entered my head.
This is where Michel Foucault's work on the Panopticon becomes surprisingly useful for understanding Instagram and TikTok.
Foucault explored how the possibility of observation can encourage people to regulate their own behavior.
Social media adds analytics.
Likes.
Views.
Shares.
Comments.
Followers.
Saves.
Watch time.
Human approval used to be messy and ambiguous.
Now it has a dashboard.
Popularity became measurable.
Attention became measurable.
Influence became measurable.
Once humans can measure something, we tend to optimize around it.
I know because I literally do this professionally.
I think about retention.
I think about search behavior.
I think about clicks.
I think about conversion.
I think about audience psychology.
What makes somebody stop?
What makes them leave?
What makes them trust?
That relationship between psychology, media and analytics is something I also explore in Why I'm Passionate About Shopify, Website Design, SEO and Digital Media.
Metrics help us understand behavior.
They also change behavior.
There is probably an entire Media Studies seminar hiding inside that sentence.
Cambridge Analytica Was a Warning About Political Data
Cambridge Analytica remains one of the clearest examples of digital data becoming political infrastructure.
The Federal Trade Commission found that Cambridge Analytica engaged in deceptive practices to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting. The operation used Facebook information in the development of personality scores and political microtargeting services.
The broader lesson extends far beyond one company.
Personal data has political value.
Traditional political advertising happens relatively publicly.
Everyone sees the billboard.
Millions of viewers can receive the same television commercial.
Journalists can inspect the message.
Opponents can respond.
Digital microtargeting makes political communication more individualized.
Different audiences can receive different messages based on demographics, interests and behavior.
Two neighbors can encounter different versions of the same political campaign.
That leaves us with a question that has bothered me since college:
How much should a political campaign know about an individual voter, and how invisible should personalized persuasion be allowed to become?
AI is going to make that question even harder.
Does Social Media Cause Political Polarization?
This is one of those questions the internet desperately wants to answer with one sentence.
Reality refuses to cooperate.
Social media can contribute to political polarization.
It operates inside a much larger system.
Political parties matter.
Economic conditions matter.
Family and community matter.
Traditional media matters.
Geography matters.
History matters.
Identity matters.
Human psychology definitely matters.
Algorithms enter that environment and personalize what people encounter.
Concepts such as echo chambers, filter bubbles and selective exposure can help explain parts of the process, but people are active participants too.
Users teach recommendation systems what they prefer.
The systems use those preferences to construct future feeds.
So the relationship works in both directions:
You train the feed through your behavior.
The feed trains your attention through repetition.
That feedback loop is far more interesting than imagining an evil algorithm hypnotizing everybody.
Media systems and audiences constantly shape one another.
Is Online Activism Actually Activism?
This was one of the questions hiding inside my original 2020 research paper, and I still think about it.
You repost the infographic.
You share the hashtag.
You put something on your Story.
You like the statement.
For a moment, it feels like participation.
Sometimes it genuinely is the beginning of something larger.
Social media can help people organize demonstrations, document injustice, raise money, distribute information, find communities and pressure institutions.
Digital participation matters.
The more interesting question is what happens next.
Does somebody learn more?
Vote?
Donate?
Volunteer?
Attend a meeting?
Contact a representative?
Change a behavior?
Have a difficult conversation?
Help organize something?
Build a community?
Or does the political participation disappear when the Story expires?
Recent Pew Research Center data shows how differently younger Americans engage with public life. Among adults ages 18 to 29, 59% said they had liked or saved online posts about news during the previous week, while 65% had privately discussed or shared news online. At the same time, older Americans were more likely to participate in several traditional civic behaviors, including voting.
That difference does not make digital participation fake.
It means political participation itself is evolving.
A repost can introduce somebody to an issue.
A TikTok can become the first time a person seriously considers a political question.
A hashtag can connect people who later organize in the physical world.
The digital action has value when it opens a door.
The door still has to lead somewhere.
Gen Z Grew Up Inside the Algorithm
Gen Z occupies a strange place in media history.
Many of us remember enough of the older internet to know things changed.
At the same time, much of our adolescence and adulthood happened inside systems built around feeds, likes, comments, followers and recommendations.
We understand the language intuitively.
Memes.
Virality.
Parasocial relationships.
Personal branding.
Cancel culture.
Algorithm anxiety.
Online identity.
Performative authenticity.
The weird feeling of knowing a creator you have never met.
The equally weird feeling that people you have never met somehow know you.
I write about Gen Z frequently because digital culture affects far more than entertainment. It changes expectations around work, identity, relationships, marketing and success.
I explore that generation more deeply in Gen Z in the Workplace: Why the Corporate World Needs Gen Z More Than Ever.
Growing up online gave Gen Z real digital fluency.
Critical literacy has to come next.
Knowing TikTok culture does not explain propaganda.
Understanding memes does not make anyone immune to misinformation.
Feeling how the algorithm behaves does not reveal who owns it, which economic incentives shaped it or what data exists underneath the recommendation.
Those questions are where Media Studies becomes valuable.
Why Media Studies Matters More Than Ever in the AI Era
People sometimes hear "Media Studies" and imagine a degree about television, movies or social media management.
That misses almost everything I found valuable about it.
Media Studies taught me to ask:
Who created this?
Who owns the system distributing it?
Who paid for it?
Who benefits?
Who gets represented?
Who disappears?
What audience is being imagined?
What emotion is being produced?
What makes this persuasive?
What economic system sits underneath it?
How does the technology change the meaning?
Those questions now apply almost everywhere.
TikTok.
Artificial intelligence.
Politics.
Advertising.
Search engines.
News.
Influencers.
Fashion.
Music.
Ecommerce.
Dating apps.
Reality television.
Even the completely unhinged meme somebody sends you at 1 a.m.
I have used the same framework while writing about RuPaul's Drag Race and modern creator culture because a television show in 2026 simultaneously exists as TV, TikTok clips, memes, fashion imagery, fandom discourse, personal brands and an entire secondary attention economy.
The object we study may be media.
The deeper subjects are human behavior, culture and power.
That is why I still love the field.
Media Literacy Now Requires AI Literacy
Traditional media literacy teaches useful questions:
Who created this?
Why?
What evidence supports it?
Which perspective is missing?
Who profits?
AI adds another layer.
Was this image generated?
Was the voice cloned?
Where did this clip originate?
Does this person exist?
What context disappeared during reposting?
Can another credible source confirm the claim?
And perhaps the most underrated question:
Why is this appearing in my feed?
Modern media literacy has to examine the message and the system distributing it.
Understanding one without the other gives you only half the picture.
Can Social Media Be Good for Democracy?
Yes.
My original 2020 paper leaned pretty dystopian.
I understand why.
I was studying surveillance, political manipulation, fake news, targeted advertising and an internet increasingly obsessed with likes, views, followers and clout.
Six years later, I still take those problems seriously.
My experience creating online also showed me another side of the system.
I have watched strangers connect through something I made.
I have watched humor travel across countries.
I have watched music create community.
I have watched people discover confidence through somebody else's story.
I have seen creators build audiences for perspectives that traditional media barely acknowledged.
Social media can amplify underrepresented voices.
It can document wrongdoing.
It can organize communities.
It can make political information easier to understand.
It can expose people to ideas outside their immediate environment.
It can create genuine human connection.
The question I care about now is more useful than deciding whether social media is simply "good" or "bad":
Under what conditions does social media strengthen democratic participation, and under what conditions does it distort, manipulate or weaken it?
Answering that requires studying algorithms, economics, ownership, psychology and politics together.
Eventually, every path leads back to power.
Platform Power Is Political Power
Whenever I analyze a digital platform now, I eventually start asking the same questions.
Who owns it?
How does it make money?
Which behaviors increase revenue?
Who writes the rules?
Who controls moderation?
Who controls recommendation?
Who gets access to user data?
Who can purchase visibility?
Which content gets monetized?
Which content disappears?
These are questions from the political economy of media.
They become especially important when private platforms begin functioning like pieces of public infrastructure.
People use social media to maintain friendships, run businesses, debate politics, follow breaking news, build communities and construct identities.
Yet the infrastructure belongs to corporations.
I think about this constantly in digital marketing.
I have described social-media audiences before as rented attention.
A creator can have a huge following and still remain dependent on infrastructure they do not control.
The algorithm changes.
Reach changes.
Platforms rise.
Platforms fall.
Another app appears.
That reality is one reason I became so interested in owned media, websites and search visibility, which connects directly with my writing about SEO, AEO and AI discoverability.
At first, that sounds like marketing strategy.
Zoom out far enough and it becomes a much bigger Media Studies question:
Who owns access to an audience?
What I Believe Now, Six Years After My Berkeley Paper
This is the part I could never have written in 2020.
Back then, I was a college student studying social media while also spending a lot of time on it.
Since then, I have experienced the system from several directions.
I studied media theory.
I became a creator.
I watched videos reach millions of people.
I entered digital marketing professionally.
I learned ecommerce.
I worked with analytics.
I studied search behavior.
I built a personal brand.
Somewhere along the way, the theories stopped feeling theoretical.
My biggest shift in thinking is simple.
In college, I was obsessed with understanding what social media was doing to people.
Now I am equally fascinated by what social media reveals about people.
The platforms reveal what captures our attention.
What makes us laugh.
What makes us angry.
What scares us.
Who we trust.
What we desire.
Who we envy.
What makes us feel attractive.
What makes us feel included.
What makes us want to belong.
What we share.
Social media did not invent those instincts.
It became extraordinarily good at measuring them.
And once human behavior becomes measurable, somebody can optimize around it.
That is why social media matters so much to democracy.
Democracy ultimately depends on human judgment.
Social platforms have become some of the most sophisticated systems ever built for observing, organizing and competing for human attention.
The Future of Democracy Is a Media Studies Problem
When I submitted my paper in 2020, generative AI had not entered everyday internet culture.
TikTok had not yet become a major American news source.
The creator economy had not reached its current scale.
Realistic synthetic political media was nowhere near this accessible.
Yet one question survived every technological change:
Who controls what we see?
Maybe that is the question underneath Media Studies itself.
Media frames reality.
Algorithms rank reality.
Journalists report reality.
Creators interpret reality.
Advertisers package reality.
Political campaigns strategically present reality.
Generative AI can simulate reality.
Audiences have to decide which version deserves their trust.
That is why I believe Media Studies becomes more useful as technology gets more complicated.
Future students will study algorithmic culture, generative AI, creator economies, synthetic media, platform governance, surveillance, digital identity and technologies we have not invented yet.
If you are studying Media Studies right now, use the theories on the internet you actually live inside.
Look at the meme.
Look at your For You page.
Look at the comment section.
Look at the advertisement everyone suddenly knows.
Look at the influencer people trust more than an institution.
Then ask why.
Why did this spread?
Why does this person feel credible?
Why is this issue suddenly everywhere?
Which emotion is being activated?
Who benefits from the attention?
Who is missing?
Who owns the infrastructure?
Why did the platform show you this particular thing?
And one question I find myself asking more than almost any other:
What is this platform teaching us to consider normal?
That curiosity is where Media Studies becomes powerful.
UC Berkeley taught me to stop treating media as background noise and start seeing it as a system.
Years later, while working in digital marketing, ecommerce, SEO and content creation, I realized I never really stopped studying Media Studies.
The classroom became the internet.
The syllabus changes every day.
Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media and Democracy
How does social media affect democracy?
Social media affects democracy by influencing what political information people encounter, which voices receive visibility, how campaigns communicate with voters and how citizens participate in public debate. Algorithms, influencers, misinformation, advertising and platform policies all shape the information environment surrounding democratic decisions.
How do social media algorithms influence politics?
Social media algorithms rank and recommend content based partly on user behavior and predicted interests. They do not directly determine everyone's political beliefs, but they can influence which issues, creators and political perspectives people repeatedly encounter.
Does TikTok influence politics?
Yes. TikTok has become an important political information environment, particularly among younger adults. Pew Research Center reported in 2026 that 43% of Americans ages 18 to 29 regularly get news from TikTok.
Does social media cause political polarization?
Social media can contribute to political polarization through personalization, selective exposure and engagement incentives. Polarization also has broader political, economic, historical and social causes, so social media is best understood as one influential part of a larger political information system.
What is the digital public sphere?
The digital public sphere describes online spaces where people encounter ideas, discuss public issues, form communities and participate in civic life. Social media greatly expanded access to public communication while simultaneously giving private technology companies substantial influence over how that communication is organized.
What is surveillance capitalism?
Surveillance capitalism is a concept associated with scholar Shoshana Zuboff that describes economic systems built around collecting and analyzing behavioral data to predict behavior and generate commercial value.
What are political deepfakes?
Political deepfakes are synthetic or digitally manipulated images, audio or video that can realistically depict politicians or events that may never have happened. Research suggests that their consequences include confusion and declining trust in news and institutions.
Can social media help democracy?
Yes. Social media can expand access to political information, amplify underrepresented perspectives, help activists organize, connect communities and make civic participation more accessible. Its democratic effects depend heavily on platform design, political institutions, media literacy and how people use the technology.
Why is Media Studies relevant in the age of AI?
Media Studies examines communication, persuasion, representation, audiences, institutions, ownership and technological power. Those frameworks are increasingly valuable as artificial intelligence changes how information is created, distributed and trusted.
Keep Reading
If this article brought you here through Media Studies, algorithms, TikTok, AI or digital culture, continue with:
- My Journey From UC Berkeley to Building a Digital Brand — how studying Media Studies shaped the way I understand marketing, identity, psychology and online culture.
- How My Zesty Sturdy Dance Hit 2.3 Million Views in 3 Days — a firsthand look at virality, attention and algorithmic distribution.
- Why I'm Passionate About Shopify, Website Design, SEO and Digital Media — how Media Studies connects with my professional digital-commerce work.
- Gen Z in the Workplace — my perspective on the generation that grew up inside modern internet culture.
- Explore Jeremy's Perspectives — more essays about culture, identity, technology and modern life.
About the Author
Jeremy Melodious is a UC Berkeley Media Studies graduate, digital creator and digital media professional who writes about social media, internet culture, Gen Z, creativity, branding and the systems shaping modern online life.
His perspective combines Media Studies theory with firsthand experience creating content, working in digital commerce and watching ideas move through modern social platforms in real time.
— Jeremy Melodious
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