Breaking the Silence: Amplifying Pluralist Voices to Safeguard Democracy

Who controls public opinion online? Research shows that an influential minority on social media spreads illiberal antidemocratic ideas by silencing opposing views to undermine support for liberal democracies. This minority, by being highly vocal and active, creates the illusion of representing a larger share of society. Bots and generative AI amplify this illusion, allowing the minority to shape public discourse and erode support for liberal democracy. This phenomenon reflects the ‘spiral of silence’ theory, which posits that individuals refrain from expressing their views when they perceive the majority to oppose them. However, robust, causal evidence testing this mechanism and its effect on liberal democratic behaviour is lacking. Equally unanswered is how to reverse this trend. PLUDEM addresses this gap by testing whether the ‘spiral of silence’ explains the silencing of pluralist voices and whether this process can be reversed to revive liberal democratic discourse online. The project hypothesises that increasing the visibility of pluralist voices in prominent debates will encourage silenced groups, including women and minorities, to re-engage, promoting pluralist political expression and strengthening democratic behaviour and attitudes. PLUDEM breaks new ground in computational political science by combining large-scale computational analyses, Large Language Models, machine learning, real-world social media and commenting experiments, in a collaboration with a pan-European grassroots network of pro-democratic volunteers. The project will provide robust causal evidence on factors contributing to the erosion of democratic behaviour and attitudes, and explain how to strengthen them. A non-academic placement with a leading European pro-democratic NGO will directly exploit the findings to ensure that PLUDEM’s impact extends beyond the project duration. In sum, PLUDEM explains how to bolster liberal democratic support in a time of acute global democratic recession.