Democracy and Digital Communication (Karoline Helbig)

How do social media platforms influence democracy? Karoline Helbig explores how platform logics - from digital architectures to economic incentives - shape public discourse and interact with broader deliberative systems. Drawing on deliberative theory and digitisation research, she offers a nuanced account of how platforms both constrain and support democratic communication. The study speaks to scholars, policymakers, and readers interested in democracy in a digital world.

Karoline Helbig holds a Technology and Human Rights Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School's Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights. She also is a senior researcher at Power for Democracies, a non-governmental, research-focused organisation dedicated to strengthening democratic resilience worldwide. She earned her doctorate in 2024 from Leibniz Universität Hannover, where her research explored the intersections of digital technology and deliberative democratic theory. With an academic background in sociology, democratic theory and mathematics, she has contributed to several interdisciplinary research initiatives examining the effects of digitisation on democratic processes, including research groups at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) and the Weizenbaum Institute.