Facebook as a Democratization Factor

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of digitalization and the spread of social networks, in particular Facebook, on the democratization process. The study reveals the theoretical model presenting Facebook as a platform for aggregation both bonding and bridging social capital. According to the model, social capital helps to develop civil society and provides communication between various political groups and establishes democratic principles. Additionally, the thesis examines the interaction of Facebook and civil society, solving the problem of fake news dissemination and preventing the establishment of censorship by authoritarian governments. The scientific novelty of this work lies in the combination of several empirical methods of analysis: preliminary creation of a general democracy index based on the V-Dem index base using the principal component method, construction of a linear multiple OLS regression, followed by case method analysis to justify and detail the results. As a result of the study, all hypotheses were confirmed.