The prevailing narrative around social media and democracy is one of alarm. Polarization, misinformation, and the erosion of civil discourse dominate the headlines, and not without reason. But political scientist Marie Schenk believes that in fixating on the most toxic corners of the internet, scholars and policymakers might be overlooking something far more consequential: the quiet, often apolitical online communities where millions of Americans don't just scroll, they participate. These spaces, built on consistent interaction, shared investment, and a sense of mutual presence, represent for many Americans their first and most formative experience of belonging. It is not passive consumption that shapes civic identity, Schenk argues, but the daily act of showing up, responding, and being heard.

"There's a lot of talk about online behavior that's very alarmist," says Schenk, assistant professor of political science. "I don't think it's wrong to say that the way we communicate online has fundamentally shifted our politics. But in focusing on explicitly political spaces, political science often misses what's going on in some of these non-political spaces, which is that they're functioning as a gathering place for like-minded people to learn about each other and about themselves in a way that wasn't available before the internet."

A Different Question About Online Community

Rather than asking whether social media is bad for democracy, Schenk explores the more nuanced question of whether non-political online spaces can be good for democracy and, if so, under what conditions.

The distinction matters enormously. Much of the existing scholarly literature frames online community as a substitute for the richer, in-person civic life that has eroded in recent decades. The loss of American social capital and civic engagement into the digital world is eulogized by many sociologists. But this framing, Schenk argues, misses a critical reality that for many people — those offline spaces were never available in the first place.

"Queer kids in rural spaces across America didn't have an in-person group available to them," she explains. "Their online activity is not replacing some better version of offline gathering. It's giving them community for the first time."

This reframing has significant implications for how researchers and policymakers evaluate the democratic value of digital spaces.

Aces and Incels: A Study in Contrasts

Schenk's current research places two Reddit communities in direct comparison, asexual communities and incel communities. On the surface, both represent spaces where individuals who feel marginalized or misunderstood have congregated online. The similarities, however, largely end there.

Incel communities have become widely recognized as sites of radicalization. These are spaces where personal grievances, often rooted in perceived social rejection, can calcify into misogyny and, in documented cases, violence. Asexual communities, by contrast, represent a population that struggled to find one another prior to the internet, and whose online gathering has been largely characterized by mutual support, identity formation, and collective self-understanding.

"How can we make more spaces like these asexual communities, empowering and mobilizing in a positive way, as opposed to sowing violence and division?" Schenk asks. The question stimulates her entire research agenda.

Mixed Methods for a Complex Problem

The methodological challenge of this research is considerable. Schenk brings an unusual dual competency to the project, a doctorate in political science combined with a master's degree in data science. Her dissertation involved the collection and analysis of 66 million tweets, and she plans to apply a similarly rigorous mixed-methods approach to the current Reddit data.

The research will begin with close, human-led reading and coding community posts, an interpretive foundation designed to identify the kinds of nuanced, politically adjacent discourse that automated methods alone cannot reliably detect. "What I'm looking for is not a word," Schenk notes. "When you're looking for non-political talk that touches on political ideas, it's hard to automate that search."

This qualitative grounding will then inform the training of computational models, likely incorporating sentiment analysis and large-scale text mining, to examine patterns across a broader dataset. The dual approach reflects a conviction that scale and depth are not mutually exclusive in social science research.

Rethinking the Echo Chamber

Any conversation about online community inevitably arrives at the question of ideological insularity, and Schenk's perspective here is deliberately calibrated. She does not dismiss the phenomenon; it is, she acknowledges, demonstrably real. But she resists the conclusion that ideological homophily is inherently anti-democratic.

"For people who've never found community, the chance to be in community is actually a really valuable first step towards political action," she argues. "Someone who is perfectly neutrally informed and can easily see both sides of the coin is not going to feel pushed to engage politically. You need to be a little bit ideologically fired up to want to become a political activist and to take a stance."

The concern, in Schenk's view, is not the formation of like-minded communities per se, but what happens next. Finding one's voice within a community is a meaningful democratic achievement. The harder question — and the one her research hopes to illuminate — is how individuals move from community membership to broader civic engagement, from identity formation to political action, without becoming so insulated that the community itself becomes a terminus rather than a launching point.

Algorithms, Architecture, and Democratic Design

A significant thread running through Schenk's research is the role of platform design in shaping political behavior. Algorithmic recommendation systems, she observes, are extraordinarily powerful—and largely invisible to users. She recounts from personal experience how a new account on X, formerly known as Twitter, can be captured by a highly curated ideological feed within minutes of initial engagement. Users are sorted into communities without awareness, and the apparent breadth of what they see is illusory.

"It's presented as if this is what the world is talking about," Schenk says, "but you had no way of knowing what you were and weren't seeing."

More broadly, Schenk is interested in whether platform design itself can be nudged toward democratic productivity. "If you make a different kind of space, people will respond differently," she suggests, pointing to Twitter’ s origins as an instructive case.  Community norms like retweeting and replying emerged from users, not designers, and the platform's eventual character was shaped as much by emergent social behavior as by intentional architectural choices. The dominant incentive structure across most social media —privileging visibility, publicity, and engagement — tends to reward controversy and conflict. Different incentive structures, she believes, could yield different social dynamics.

The ambition animating Schenk's broader research program is the development of a coherent theoretical framework, an account of what distinguishes online spaces that foster civic engagement from those that undermine it. She is candid about the difficulty of this undertaking, and modest about what a single comparative study can resolve. But the stakes, in her view, justify the effort. Ultimately, Schenk envisions research that speaks not only to academic audiences but to policymakers with the power to act, whether by establishing design requirements for social media platforms or enacting targeted protections for adolescents. The question of what the internet does to democracy, she suggests, is too important to leave to algorithm designers alone.

"If we can figure out more about what it is about the digital architecture of these spaces—or the types of conversations they have—that make some spaces productive for democracy and some spaces unproductive, then policymakers can start to intervene."

Whether the internet is good or bad for democracy may be the wrong question. The better question, as Schenk frames it, is which parts of the internet are designed in which ways, for which communities, under which conditions, which might help people find each other—and then, together, find their way into the public square.