Regarding the dangers of disinformation, one way to build a democracy that is largely immune to disinformation would be to build a democracy in which you only vote for people whom you know personally. That would mean introducing another layer of representation, in-between the public and Congress. The simplest and most naive approach would simply establish districts of 860 people:

330,000,000 / 860 = 383,720

383,720 / 860 = 460

In other words, in the USA, where we have 330 million people and a House of 430 Representatives, if we wanted to keep the House at that size, while only having people vote for people that they know, you would divide them up into very small districts of a few hundred people, so that people in the districts could get to know each other directly, without having to rely on something like television.

860 people would be the population of a neighborhood in the suburbs, or 2 large apartment buildings where I live in New York City.

Someone will probably respond "Your intermediate district has 383,720 people in it." Right, but the 860 elected representatives in that district know they only need to get to know each other.

There is a small historical precedent for this, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, a democracy that at its peak in the 1500s had 10% of the population voting, in a system of small Sejms that would then send representatives to the main Sejm in the capitol. For many reasons, this is worth more study. The Commonwealth was the largest and most successful experiment with democracy that existed in the West between the end of ancient Athenian democracy and the revolutions of the 1700s.

I will say, based on personal experience, people's behavior is non-partisan when they vote for someone who they know personally. Indeed, it seems to engage a completely different part of the human brain.

To understand this, it is worth studying what happened to my mom. She is a left-leaning leader in a strongly Republican town (Jackson, New Jersey), yet the Republicans appointed her to the Environmental Commission and the Planning Board, because they knew her and trusted her. My mom served from 1973 to 2019, 46 years in total, and was finally given an award from the city government that recognized her as the longest serving member of the Jackson government, since its founding in 1848. She served for 26% of the town's total history.

My mom worked as a teacher in the high school, and even though most of her students, and their parents, were Republican, they loved her and wanted her to serve in government.

An illustration of this was during the angry years after 2008 when a new kind of Republican entered town politics, basically the Tea Party Republicans. They were very loyal to the real estate developers, who hated my mom, and so they conspired to oust my mom in 2009. This lead to an outcry, throughout the town, and so my mom was reappointed. You can read that story here:

http://www1.gmnews.com/2009/07/30/board-member-offers-to-ste...

The point is, this is an overwhelming Republican town that for 46 years was willing to appoint a left-leaning activist to several government commissions, because when they thought about my mom, they did not think about her in partisan terms. Instead, they thought of her as the teacher and activist that they loved.

From this I conclude, when people vote for people who they know personally, they engage a very different part of their brain, relative to the part of the brain they use when engaged in partisan politics.

Having said all this, I don't think a simple division of the pubic by 860 is ideal. I suggest a somewhat more subtle system here:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...