Interestingly, in Some Smaller Democratic Countries, Facebook may function as the essential platform for society-level political discussion. In my Small Country, government members have made relevant statements first via their social media accounts, not via journalism. Most public intellectuals here seem to have a FB account, and a probably increasing amount of discussions in "real journalism" actually stem from some FB thread that went out of hand.

I find this really interesting sociologically, because at the algorithms level, this means that political discussion in A Small Society is actually curated or influenced under-the-hood by a US-based Megacorp.

Basically, if you're not on FB in My Small Society, you're missing out a good deal of political discussion.

There have been attempts of building local, homemade online environments for political discussion in my country, but these haven't really taken off, because, well, everybody's already on Facebook, including politicians. My only hope is that FB will become increasingly annoying to use because of their ad policies, and maybe this would cause more people to abandon the platform and build homemade alternatives on their own.

IMO all kinds of decentralised Smolnet-like things might have good potential for political discussion in Small Societies, but maybe they're still waiting for their time. Quite possibly, simply waiting for the next generation of users -- that are more touchy about the technical, surveilliance and algorithm-level details of online discussions.