Welcome to my latest news round-up. There will be no Platformocracy next week due to the US Fourth of July holiday, and so I can recover from a severe sports overdose I incurred during the World Cup group stage.
Platformocracy in the news
Some recent stories that highlight threads of my core argument around platform democracy.
Google for Creators
Google introduces creator profiles that will show up in Search and the Discover feed. This adds a micro-step toward verified identity and Credible Exit by supporting authenticated links to Instagram, TikTok, and X accounts as well as YouTube, plus a links section. It’s also another sign of how “social media” is an incredibly blurry term. The announcement blog post sounds a lot like YouTube comms to me. [Note it’s limited for now to US publishers and creators with a large following.]
Whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams sues Meta over attempts to ‘silence’ her (The Guardian)
The author of the excellent Meta tell-all Careless People strikes back. The court filing shows how Meta lawyers use arbitration aggressively to protect their interests. For example, ensuring Wynn-Williams would miss the arbitration hearing by sending the notice to an out-of-date email address. This is more evidence of why mandatory arbitration clauses in platform terms of service are bad for us, and why legal departments are not a good home for trust and safety teams that are supposed to be protecting us, not the company.
Smart thinking on platform power and decentralization
If I am your main source for thinking about democracy online, then A) I am grateful and flattered, but also B) you need to get out more. I am merely following in a long tradition of talented writers and thinkers. Here are some good examples worth your time.
Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet
Another important essay from Mike Masnick, founder of TechDirt and author of the paper that helped inspire Bluesky: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech. Despotification is Masnick’s new term for platforms leveraging market concentration, lack of credible exit, and algorithmic recommendations to seize political power.
The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy
An elegant research summary from Bristol, UK psychology professor and misinformation researcher Stephan Lewandowsky. In short: there appears to be a correlation between the rollout of broadband Internet and political polarization. While algorithmic feeds are part of the picture, the inherent nature of the Internet is part of the problem. The Internet makes it easy to form homophilic networks (people who like the same things as you). Spending time with like-minded people gives you a false view of society’s consensus on any given issue. Thus, conflict! Lewandowsky co-led a much longer report on this theme for the European Commision called Fractured Reality.
Technology Paternalism, Continued - Five Abilities and a Test for Self-Sovereign Identity
Martina Kolpondinos from the First Person Project writes a deeply considered (and lengthy) synthesis of ideas around platform power and the potential of self-sovereign identity to put us back in control. Bonus points for citing my work extensively. I appreciate her bringing back an old framework of mine which should probably get an update: that we should have the right to understand safety systems, consent to any changes, and to regularly inspect them to be sure they are doing what they claim.
If there’s one cause that unites politicians of all stripes in this fractured age, it’s taking the Internet away from teenagers. If I tried to cover everything happening here, I would never be able to write about anything else. Here are a few recent pieces that caught my eye.
How and Why to Fight Back Against Social Media Bans, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
“As legislators across the country advance proposals that would block all young people from accessing the “modern public square,” the Overton window has shifted dramatically towards mass censorship—and the speed of this shift should concern all of us. This primer breaks down this dangerous wave of social media bans: how they work (and why they don’t), who they harm, and how we can fight back.”
White House helped Mark Zuckerberg and the Google CEO dodge a Senate grilling (POLITICO)
“The White House intervened to try to spare Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai from appearing at an upcoming Senate hearing on their companies’ child safety practices, five people with knowledge of the events told POLITICO. Instead, Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has agreed to let the heads of the tech giants’ Instagram and YouTube brands testify in the chief executives’ place at next month’s hearing, tentatively scheduled for July 28, four of the people said. And in turn, the White House is supporting a Grassley-backed package of bills — called the James T. Woods Act — aimed at combating online child exploitation, they added.”
Google's YouTube settles case over social media harm to children (Reuters)
“YouTube has settled a lawsuit brought by a minor who claimed the platform damaged his mental health, his lawyers said Tuesday, ahead of a second California trial over social media's role in the youth mental health crisis. The terms of the settlement of the state court lawsuit were confidential, the lawyers said on Tuesday. The suit named four defendants — YouTube, Meta's Instagram, Snap Inc's Snapchat and ByteDance's TikTok — and the remaining three companies are still set to face trial in July.”
Assessing early effects of Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age Act on adolescents’ social media use (research paper in the BMJ)
“Despite the intent of the Social Media Minimum Age Act 2024 to delay access to social media platforms and reduce the potential for online harms, little evidence was found of immediate substantive reductions in reported social media use by adolescents under 16 years.” [cue sad trombone noises - Ed.]
How do you like this format? Are news round-ups useful for you? Should I do this more often? How about including news links in weekly articles too? Let me know your thoughts at [email protected]. And as always, please share this with anyone you think might find it useful. Thanks!
