A Comment on "A Systematic Review of Worldwide Causal and Correlational Evidence on Digital Media and Democracy" by Lorenz-Spreen et al., (2023)

In this study, we conduct a direct replication of Lorenz-Spreen et al. (2023)'s systematic review on digital media and democracy to verify and enhance the robustness of their findings. We successfully reproduce the main claims of the original paper, uncovering a few minor coding errors that do not affect the study's primary results. Our replication updates the dataset with recent publications up to March 23, 2024. After screening 2,567 papers, we included 110 that met the original study's criteria. We then replicated the results from original paper and employed topic modeling and word frequency analysis to identify key themes and trends. This replication confirms the original findings and provides an updated perspective on the relationship between digital media and democracy.