In this case, I would say the participants of the local society are responsible for paying for journalism and working to support local elections. But even then, you could come up with arguments such as so and so population was too poor and had to work two jobs and did not have time to attend city/county/state meetings, or were not sufficiently educated or literate to understand them, etc.
But where your value proposition is created by code your code defines your business model to a critical extent.
Not having local newspapers/journalism causing problems with the local civic process is a separate problem, that has nothing to do with technology enabling sellers and buyers to reach each other more easily.
Better for whom?
The discoveries of fossil fuels brought about new ways of solving certain problems, with the benefit of hindsight they too were also not without fairly major negative consequences.
"Technology" isn't just relentlessly positive.
Not hard to extract, nor worth getting heated about.