I think I agree in theory, but I think we've seen in practice that people are easily controlled by mass media. Wouldn't we just be moving the locus of control?
It's a form of representative democracy, so it should be able to avoid the issues of oligarchy (being centralized and easy to corrupt) as well as the issues of full democracy (where every idiot has a say worth any experts)
Why would you believe that both the individual voters and their delegates wouldn't be susceptible to almost all the same corrupting and manipulative factors that plague voting systems today?
The OP is correct...spending in mass media on the various issues would almost surely allow the purchasing of voter mindshare just exactly as advertising today drives sales of almost identical branded products for inflated prices.
Don't get me wrong...in general I like the idea of "liquid democracy" (I remember it being called "Superdemocracy" back in the 80's when MajorBBS creator Tim Striker very much lobbied for its creation)...but it would be foolish to believe that the same forces that corrupt modern politics wouldn't be able to corrupt it as well.
Corruption is still possible, but the real trick to liquid democracy is that every stage is a form of escalation with the potential for correction.
Let's take two scenarios:
1. a vote is being passed "up" and crosses an extremist channel, it'll likely get locked in and come out even more extreme than it started. extremists tend to look up to people who are even more extreme. when this happens, there's a good chance the person who's vote it originally was will be upset with where it ends up
2. a vote is being passed "up" and crosses an intellectual/thoughtful person, it'll likely get locked into the academic/altruist channel and come out with an extreme subject expert. this is the ideal outcome.
Basically, at any point where the vote is being passed up it can hit one of these channels and get locked in. There's massive (and immediate) drawbacks to letting your vote hit an extremist, and massive gains to passing to someone who's more intelligent and thoughtful.
While you're totally right about peoples first vote being super manipulable, each successive pass off has an opportunity for escaping that mind control. And once it does, it'll stay out.
Liquid democracy is something that can be built from the ground up, and has the potential to deprecate our modern system.