A stable democracy presupposes a well-functioning public sphere, which in turn is strongly linked to the provision of information by pluralistic mass media such as television, radio and press. Only in a polity in which information is freely accessible to the public can the latter make informed decisions and exercise democratic control. Media institutions perform a public role by putting information into context and providing a place for societal debates, thereby influencing the public discourse. Social media has transformed the way we communicate by changing communication from a ‘one-to-many’ structure to a ‘many-to-many’ structure in which essentially every citizen becomes able to distribute information to a wider audience on the internet. This paper discusses how social media impacts the public sphere and proposes regulatory solutions to ensure a pluralistic information landscape as a means of protecting democracy, with a particular focus on EU initiatives in this sense.

Our next Annual Conference will take place from July 6-9, 2021. It will be held in a completely novel way as a fully online Conference: ICON•S Mundo.
The Call for Papers for ICON•S Mundo is available here. Submissions for papers and panels must be made by May 1, 2021.
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