Is online disinformation a threat to the uptake of deliberative democracy? Investigating citizen responses to elites’ disinformative “red scare” claims

In April 2020, Thomas Kemmerich, an elected politician with the German Free Democratic Party, tweeted an attack on Robert Habeck, leader of the Greens. His tweet attacked Habeck’s support for the federal Bürgerrat Demokratie (Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy). In his attack, Kemmerich compares this citizen-centered participatory forum of deliberation to the soviets (councils) utilized during the Communist era of East Germany. In this paper, we argue that political actors' conflation of a citizens’ assembly with soviets is a deliberate attempt to introduce a totalitarian connotation to the public’s perceptions of an emergent, unfamiliar forum of deliberative democracy. Simply, this tactic is used by opponents of emergent institutions of democratic participation to disseminate a negative impression of mini-publics. This mode of political communication exemplifies a weaponization of memories of non-democratic life from Europe’s past to derail a deepening of democracy in its future. We further argue that opponents of deepening democratic participation beyond the familiar system of electoral representative democracy represent the interests of a liberal economic order that seeks to shun voices which may threaten the institutions and hegemony that uphold it. This case is an instance of a political actor wielding memory politics to sustain the status quo of democratic engagement. But this comes at the cost of the opportunity to expand citizens’ ability to engage in democratic decision-making, as well as the opportunity to expand citizens’ conception of democracy itself beyond electoral representative democracy. To build out our argument, we examine the discourse surrounding several influential tweets, including the above tweet by Kemmerich, as well as cases from France (regarding citizen deliberation in response to the Yellow Vest protests) and the United States (regarding congressional hearings following the January 6 riots). Each tweet makes misleading claims to associate democratic practices with undemocratic or totalitarian public memory. Types of discourse are formulated to classify replies and quote tweets into three groups: supportive discourses, oppositional discourses, and educational discourses. We propose that improved political education is required to inform political actors and the public on the procedures of mini publics and, most crucially, the complementary function they serve in the representative democratic political system. This education should focus on improving people’s understanding of how participatory forums work, including their selection procedures, deliberation procedures, and an account of how the forum’s outputs translate into policy outcomes.