Opinion: The Algorithm That Ate Democracy – How Social Media Undermined America’s Democratic Foundations

In How to Stand Up to a Dictator, Nobel laureate Maria Ressa issues a dire warning: the architecture of modern social media—especially Facebook—has become one of the most powerful accelerants of authoritarianism across the globe. While her story is grounded in the Philippines, where she faced harassment, legal attacks, and disinformation campaigns under President Rodrigo Duterte, the book makes clear that the mechanisms that dismantled democratic norms in her country are not unique. They are transnational, coded into the very infrastructure of the internet, and nowhere are their consequences more evident than in the United States.

The core of Ressa’s argument is that Facebook’s business model prioritizes engagement over truth, outrage over nuance, and surveillance over citizenship. In doing so, it has systematically undermined the basic conditions required for democracy to function: a shared understanding of reality, the ability to deliberate across difference, and trust in democratic institutions. The story of America’s democratic unraveling in the digital age is not primarily a tale of malicious actors or partisan politics—it is, as Ressa shows, the result of design choices made by powerful technology companies and left unregulated by governments that failed to grasp the stakes.

When Facebook first emerged, it promised connection, community, and free expression. But as Ressa documents, the platform’s algorithms were engineered not to inform but to capture attention. Every click, like, and share helped refine a personalized feed that maximized time-on-site and ad revenue. In practice, this meant privileging emotionally charged content—especially anger, fear, and resentment—because it was more likely to go viral.

This seemingly neutral logic of engagement had devastating consequences for democratic culture. In Ressa’s words, “anger is the contagious currency of Facebook’s profit machine.” Content that enraged users was algorithmically amplified, while fact-checked, contextualized journalism was drowned out or de-prioritized. When lies spread faster than facts, bad actors win by default, because disinformation is cheaper, more emotional, and more shareable than complex truth.

In the U.S., this dynamic played directly into the hands of far-right movements, conspiracy theorists, and authoritarian political figures. Ressa notes that Facebook’s own internal research showed that 64% of extremist group joins were due to its recommendation algorithms, yet executives failed to act for fear of alienating Republican lawmakers and losing market access. The result was a flood of toxic content: QAnon conspiracies, white replacement theory, anti-vaccine propaganda, and ultimately, the “Stop the Steal” movement that culminated in the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Democracy depends on the ability of citizens to engage in meaningful debate about the common good. That in turn requires a shared reality built on evidence and facts. But Facebook and similar platforms have atomized the information environment, creating what Ressa calls “billions of Truman Shows.” Each user now occupies a curated reality bubble, increasingly disconnected from the larger public sphere. If two citizens can’t even agree on what is real, then political disagreement becomes impossible to resolve through reason or compromise—it devolves into a zero-sum cultural war.

This breakdown of shared truth is not just epistemological; it is institutional. Ressa highlights how journalism, once the key arbiter of public knowledge, has been displaced by platforms that have no commitment to truth, no ethical obligations, and no civic mission. The very design of social media rewards falsehood—not in spite of its structure, but because of it.

Moreover, as journalism was pushed to the margins, democratic institutions became more vulnerable to attack. Courts, legislatures, and elections began to be viewed not as legitimate arbiters of public will but as rigged systems manipulated by unseen elites. Authoritarian figures—from Duterte to Trump—exploited this cynicism to consolidate power, discredit critics, and bypass accountability.

Underlying all of this is what Ressa and thinkers like Shoshana Zuboff call surveillance capitalism—an economic system that treats human behavior as raw data to be extracted, commodified, and manipulated. In this model, platforms don’t just reflect public opinion; they shape it, often in ways invisible to the user.

This opens the door to what Ressa calls asymmetrical information warfare, where governments, political campaigns, and private interest groups can weaponize platforms to manipulate entire populations. In the Philippines, fake accounts, meme pages, and influencer propaganda created an illusion of popular support for Duterte’s bloody drug war. In the U.S., Cambridge Analytica and other firms harvested voter data to micro-target fear-based messaging to vulnerable communities.

What makes this form of authoritarianism so insidious is that it does not require overt censorship or military coups. As Ressa notes, Duterte never needed to declare martial law—the pandemic and social media did it for him. Likewise, Trump did not need to dismantle democratic institutions; he eroded trust in them, encouraged online mobs to spread lies, and used social media to redefine truth itself.

What Ressa makes painfully clear is that the downfall of democracy in America is not a story of foreign interference or partisan betrayal alone—it is the logical outcome of a digital information ecosystem without ethical guardrails, civic oversight, or democratic accountability.

The stakes could not be higher. When truth becomes optional and outrage becomes profitable, the foundation of self-government begins to rot. The public becomes easier to divide, elections become easier to delegitimize, and authoritarianism becomes easier to sell.

The path forward, according to Ressa, requires a radical rethinking of both journalism and technology. First, we must demand accountability from platforms: algorithmic transparency, human rights impact assessments, and a ban on surveillance advertising. Second, we must revive journalism as a civic institution—not just financially, but morally. Journalists must abandon false neutrality and embrace their role as defenders of fact, justice, and democracy. Third, we must build communities of action, grounded in shared values and civic engagement, that can resist the viral lies and polarization tearing society apart.

In short, we need to rebuild the architecture of truth before democracy collapses for good. The invisible atom bomb that exploded in our information ecosystem will not be defused by good intentions alone. It will require courage, coordination, and a collective reawakening to what is at stake.

Maria Ressa stood up to a dictator—and in doing so, exposed the deeper crisis that afflicts us all. The fight for our future is not just about politics. It is about reclaiming the conditions for truth, trust, and freedom in a world increasingly engineered to destroy them.

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