Apologies for the delay from Friday to Monday for this issue of Platformocracy. I had a big night out at new NJ Governor Mikie Sherrill’s inaugural ball, and then my family and I were all laid low with seasonal maladies, so things slipped.
Why talk about online due process, given gestures at everything?
In my last issue, I proposed adding Due Process to Rabble’s Social Media Bill of Rights. This topic is near and dear to my heart. My team and I got deeply involved in improving Google's appeals process for account terminations near the end of my time at the company. (You can see a reference to some this work at the end of this 2022 blog post about child safety.) This was in part required by new rights in the EU’s Digital Services Act, but was also an honest attempt to alleviate some of the real human despair experienced by people who lost everything they had entrusted to Google.
Of course, it’s a bit rich to use an emotive word like “despair” for losing an internet account, when measured against the harm being done by the masked government agents rampaging through Minneapolis and other communities around the US. There’s a glib, shitty version of this post that would try to draw a direct moral equivalence between online and real-world enforcement. I’m trying hard to avoid that. Obviously, obviously, being kicked out of a social network is not the same as being taken to a detention center, deported, sprayed in the face with chemicals, or shot dead.
And yet, the moral gulf doesn’t mean irrelevance. Our online lives are not our real lives, but they are still important to us. Denying us due process online is not the same as violating our human rights, but it is still harmful. As UC Boulder Professor Nathan Schneider wrote (and I discussed last year), the authoritarian nature of online enforcement undermines our experience of real-world democracy.
We rely on a constitution and laws to protect our real-world rights, but online platforms demand fealty to an interminable terms of service document that they know nobody actually reads.
We expect our real-world privacy to be protected against governmental overreach, but online platforms quietly operate massive surveillance systems that monitor everything you do and say for legal and policy violations.
We are disgusted by the politicization of real-world law enforcement and the courts, but are subject to online policy and enforcement decisions held subordinate to platform business and strategic goals.
This isn’t just a theoretical risk, because online business leaders are moving into real-world politics. Elon Musk, the owner of a major social media platform, spent over $290 million on the 2024 US election and played a major role in the early days of the new administration. Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, whose companies have authority over hundreds of millions (probably billions) of user accounts, just attended a black-tie screening of the new Melania Trump documentary at the White House, mere days after ICE agents killed Alex Pretti.
I see a mirror trend as US political rhetoric starts to sound more like the authoritarian online approach to enforcement. Tennessee Representative Any Ogles said in May 2025 that “he believed only citizens were entitled to due process.” And Texas Representative Tony Gonzales said on January 15 that “When they’re being confronted by an ICE agent, that’s at the end of the road. That’s not the beginning of the due process, it’s the end of the due process.”
[For the record: Supreme Court Justice Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 1993 that "it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings."]
I’m going to keep writing about online due process
At the end of the day, for better or worse, the lane I have chosen is online democracy, so that is where I’m going to try to make a bit of a difference. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to propose an initial plan for online due process that I think most platforms could realistically make. If I’m lucky, a few of you who are in the business will find me persuasive, and even try to build some of it.
I’m going to start my pitch on Friday. I will sketch out a framework and choose a specific use case for online due process improvements. From there, I will detail the changes a platform could make to put this into action. And I will do my best to discuss risks and how to mitigate them.
I can’t claim that improving due process online would solve our real-life crisis, but I am optimistic that it could be part of the overall move toward justice that we desperately need right now.
See you on Friday.
Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].
