This past week, Political Union debated whether social media is corrosive to democracy. I took the stance that it wasn’t. I believe that social media is not corrosive to democracy for two reasons. First, social media is significant to movements that promote democracy. The most prominent example is the Arab Spring, in which social media played an integral part in mobilizing protests across multiple countries.

According to a study done at the University of Washington in which more than 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts were analyzed, the role of social media in shaping discourse was significant. Online discussions often occurred right before major events, and the inspiring stories of brave citizens protesting authoritarian regimes reached an international audience.

A specific way in which social media was used to strengthen the movements was through the instantaneous ability to share horrifying abuse committed by police in Tunisia and Egypt, for example — recall the infamous story of Khaled Mohamed Said, a computer programmer the police beat to death in the streets of Egypt.

According to an essay in Technology Review, the photos shared of Said’s disfigured corpse sparked a movement on Facebook, “We Are All Khaled Said,” which became a Facebook group with almost 1.5 million members. Social media, specifically Facebook, functioned in two ways throughout this movement — it became a platform to spread images and videos depicting the atrocious acts committed by the police and it provided an accessible platform to spread information about the logistics of protests.

Videos of police brutality against black Americans also went viral on social media in 2016. This helped spread awareness about the fatally excessive force white police officers get away with. A striking case of this was Diamond Reynolds’ use of Facebook Live to document the aftermath of her boyfriend Philando Castile’s shooting by a police officer in Minnesota. As of 2018, the video had been viewed more than 5.6 million times.

Even if social media does nothing else, it provides a platform for people to see evidence of injustice when it occurs, which is necessary for democracy. I won’t deny the bias inherent to social media, in fact, I love to call it out. But the reality is with so many people using social media as their news source, it’s necessary to acknowledge the important role social media plays in promoting at least some awareness.

My second reason is that bias is a political issue, not a social media issue.

The view that social media is bad for democracy doesn’t take into consideration the responsibility of individuals to check that bias. Resigning to this idea actually allows us to blame the polarization rampant in our society on the tool used to wield our opinions rather than acknowledge that we have a choice in how we use that tool. Additionally, simply concluding that social media is bad for democracy erases the way that social media can be used to promote awareness and foster discussion. Of course, these discussions can be ugly and the news radically biased, but to focus solely on that is to miss all of the ways social media has vastly increased access to learning resources.

Think of social media as any other tool: It can be used for good or evil, and the choice lies in individuals, not in the entity itself.

We can’t risk ignoring social media’s part in one of the most important pieces of our democracy: an informed public with access to a variety of perspectives. To ignore this is to excuse ourselves from reflecting on the ways we can improve how social media is used in democracies and to decrease places it weakens it. Twitter’s announcement to ban all political advertising, for example, might be a step in the right direction, as it can decrease the frequency of paid political reach. It’s also putting heavy pressure on Facebook to do the same.

Ultimately, we need to have faith in the ways social media can uplift democracy rather than corrode it in order to better society as a whole.

Elizabeth Sperti is a Weinberg sophomore. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.