It is a mistake to call the form of representative government used today "democracy". The system is designed in such a way as to keep the influence of ordinary people, who are not heavily invested in the system, very minimal. Usually this is done by parties promising rather different things before elections, but afterwards coming to some agreement and doing something unrelated to the promises. Now that there are new ways to organize via social media, people can behave in unexpected ways, and some people bemoan this as weakening of democracy.

But in fact it is not. People deciding what policies to use doesn't become less democratic simply because someone thinks these people are stupid/mislead by false news etc. Refusing them the right to vote or to communicate their beliefs is just as undemocratic as refusing well educated citizen the same right.

The focus should be on finding ways to make decisions less global, so that ill effects of a bad decision are experienced only by the people making it, and they have an opportunity to learn from it and make a better decision the next time.

The solution is to stop voting for people and vote for individual policies. With open online direct voting with a way to trade votes and option to delegate votes [1], we'll discover that in reality we agree on much more than we are led to believe from following social media. And we'll discover that there is a huge space for compromise that we were unable to explore so far because exploring it was disadvantageous to the representatives that we had to elect.

[1] https://voteflux.org/#flux-in-a-nutshell