Lawfare Daily: How Social Media Threatens Democracy, with Rick Pildes

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

On today’s episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Kate Klonick sits down with NYU law professor Rick Pildes to discuss his article, “Political Fragmentation in Democracies in the West,” which was featured in a New York Times opinion column by Thomas Edsall on the link between smartphone and social media use and threats to democracy.

The two discuss the admittedly sprawling topic from a historical perspective—comparing the impact of the internet to that of the printing press, the radio, and cable television on social orders. But they also discuss how this technology that once held such promise for democracy is now impacting the United States political system in a unique way—in particular, the ability social media has to further polarize a two-party system's information ecosystem while also revolutionizing small-donor-based campaigns. The result is some very anti-democratic outcomes from what was seen as such promising democracy-empowering technology.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	If we could get a handle on the issues that preoccupy a lot of the discussion of the platforms,
0:08.2	you know, offensive speech or hate speech or disinformation, I still think the effects of these
0:15.9	technologies would be incredibly profound.
0:20.1	It's the Lawfare podcast.
0:22.0	I'm Kate Klonick, Senior Editor at Lawfare,
0:24.2	with Rick Pildy's Professor of Constitutional Law
0:26.5	at New York University Law School.
0:29.6	We may be moving to a sustained era in which
0:34.0	there's much more widespread participation politically. There's much more mobilization of people in politics because of these new technologies.
0:44.0	But it will also mean that it will be very easy to mobilize opposition to government, no matter what government is doing, mobilize dissatisfaction.
0:55.0	Today we're talking about an inescapable question for those of us that study the law and technology.
1:01.0	Is social media responsible for the fall of Western democracy?
1:05.0	I wanted to kind of start with walking the audience into what prompted me to reach out to you and have you
1:12.7	come on the podcast. And that was something that I was not expecting, which was a Thomas Edzall
1:16.3	column in the New York Times, which is a social media killing democracy. And nothing against
1:21.5	Edzall. I like him, but I don't, he's 84 years old. I didn't exactly expect him to suddenly
1:26.7	be weighing into the debate over social media. And so years old, I didn't exactly expect him to suddenly be weighing into the
1:27.8	debate over social media and so I was, I was surprised at how great his column was actually
1:33.1	and it will be in the show notes for those that want to take a look at it.
1:36.7	And we're going to be having a few more of the people that he interviewed on because I thought
1:40.0	it was a great mix of individuals.
1:44.0	You, I was really relieved when I read it that you were actually at the top of his quotes of the first sources that he went to, which immediately lent his columns and credibility.
	...

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