Ideally through a representative candidate you'd be able to effectively impact legislative matters as a unified voice. Unionisation and public pressure would ideally protect against abuses and help to usher in paradigm shifts in legislative decision making.
This worked for a while, when the internet and social media weren't as misused and overall the media existed with a greater saturation of independent journalists employing it as a medium to combat the worst enemy of the public: lack of information.
True democracy was about "one person, one vote".
We used to have representative democracy, because (a) there was no internet. Parliament/Congress could only rely on votes, by people showing up. Most people couldn't get the time off work to attend Parliament/Congress and vote. So we had representatives.
A 2nd reason why we had representative democracy, was that most people were only taught to read, write and do arithmetic, and were working 12 hours a day doing were extremely physical work and were exhausted after work. They didn't have the time or the education to research an issue. So they would elect rich, educated people who didn't have to work that hard, and had the time and education to research an issue.
The internet could have been used to increase democracy. We could have given everyone the power to vote on Parliamentary bills, simply by giving everyone the ability to register their votes through the internet.
Also, today, most people are taught a lot in public schools, and don't work that hard, and only for only 8 hours a day for 5 days a week, or less. Moreover, the internet can give them free access to read bills at their leisure. So they have the time, the education and the access to research issues that will be voted on, and to come to considered opinions.
That didn't happen. So instead the medium of the internet was used to convince people who to vote for instead, by people who wanted to manipulate the general public.
Now the establishment agenda is to instead of restricting information, to simply flood information pipelines with disinformation instead and distort the truth. At this point it's become so effective that media is failing to hold government accountable even for outright corruption in many cases. Independent journalists and those who seek to tell truth are bullied directly or indirectly. The result is that fewer and fewer people who are in journalism to speak truth to power exist, and fewer far-reaching platforms exist for those who still do.
As a result, falsehoods and the seeds of fascism slowly seep into public mentality at the seams.
When it gets to this point, it's time to start revolutionising and holding people in power to account the good old-fashioned French way. With guillotines
Anyone can spread false information on the internet, because it's like international waters. Anyone from any country can gain access to it. So the sources that people in your country read, are not tied to any one country, and so your country cannot effectively police them to make sure that they are all honest.
What makes most sense, is that we treat it like international waters, which has international maritime law, and declare the internet similarly, to have its own internet-based code of law, which all countries would then agree to and agree to enforce.
Admittedly, getting all countries to agree on anything tends to be difficult. But it does happen with some parts of some laws. So we only need for now, to get the bits that all nations do agree with, to become part of internet law, and leave the rest to be debated ad nauseum by politicians in the UN, until everyone gets sick of the arguments and agrees to make a decision, just to get something done.
But, then politicians in government and the legislature won't be able to use the internet to gain power. Judges will not longer be the sole abritrator of what is right, wrong, moral and immoral in the cases they preside on. Power will be lost by those who have lots of power in the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judiciary, in every country in the world.
