If blogs, ads, and telegram channels can overturn elections then isn’t that a bad sign for democracy as an idea? That would imply rule of media rather than decision making citizens.

It used to be mass media before, now it’s social media. Is that such a big jump? Social media has much more influence from unknown or foreign sources, so you could say yes.

Also, influence of money on politics is obviously huge. You can predict the winner based on how much money they have, and the mass media blitzes they do, on a lot of local elections.

Democracy as an idea, I think people need a certain level of media literacy and the media has to be unbiased for people to make good decisions. But then, that was not a thing in the mass media era and that’s clearly not a thing in the social media era.