COVID-19: informational inequality and democracy

Abstract

The crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic magnified social asymmetries. Declining income, greater exposure to unemployment, job instability, increased gender inequalities, collapse of public healthcare, and worse performance in learning and educational equality are some consequences of the increase in global inequality. This contribution defends the idea that inequity also manifested itself as informational inequality. In this context, where the weighing of information became more complex, and epistemic and axiological aspects of risk culture emerged with singular clarity, social identity affected the ability to evaluate technical and political facts. Social groups with less education and income had a more restricted informational diet, with an emphasis on social networks, less knowledge about the virus, ambivalence about the measures to be taken, or difficulties in considering the quality of media and institutional information. In short, they were more exposed to disinformation campaigns, particularly intensified with the rise of social networks in the world of digital capitalism. On an individual level, this asymmetry conspires against the autonomy of people and their condition as citizens. On the collective level, it threatens the scope and quality of scientific-technological culture and democratic governance. It is necessary to discuss the relationship between disinformation and democracy, and to reappraise the role of political participation for governance and of education for autonomy, thought, and the development of a cosmopolitan civic ethic.