If you’re new to Platformocracy, this is the perfect place to start. If you’re a fan who wants to get others on board, this is the post to share. I’ve summarized a year of posts into a single essay about platform power and how to remedy it. What do you think? Let me know at [email protected]!
An imperfect democracy is a misfortune for its people, but an imperfect authoritarian regime is an abomination.
Internet platforms have become our unelected governments
I love the Internet, but it’s not a safe place. Sure, it’s got Wikipedia, online communities for any identity or interest, and a billion mobile phone apps. But at the same time, we all know people (or their children) who have been harassed, scammed, radicalized, or worse. We’ve had to invent entirely new words for the many new kinds of Internet badness like brigading, catfishing, deepfakes, and doxxing.
Platforms tell us that they take these harms seriously, and are doing everything they can to eliminate them. They point to internal teams carrying names designed to be vague but reassuring like “Trust and Safety,” “Integrity,” or “Quality.” All we need to do is follow their rules, known as “community guidelines,” “terms of service,” or “codes of conduct.”
Would that it were so simple. In reality, these departments are enormous bureaucracies who decide on the rules behind closed doors and enforce them with pervasive surveillance systems that they treat as state secrets. If the automatic system doesn’t catch the problem you are facing, it is incredibly hard to even get a platform’s attention, let alone their help.
And God help you if the machine decides you’re the problem. You may lose your account, all of your files and connections, and never get a straight answer about what you’ve done, let alone an opportunity to make it right. Platforms are even trying to cut you off from the legal system with mandatory arbitration clauses and bans on filing class action suits.
Billions of people around the world are now subject to rules they didn’t vote for, enforced by algorithms they can’t understand and people they aren’t allowed to speak to. Not a democracy, but a Platformocracy.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We can do better.
Big tech’s original sins: implicit feudalism and guardianship
Every computer system bakes in authoritarianism by default. The administrator account has absolute power, like a medieval monarch. They can delete things, ban users, or kill the system outright as they see fit, and cannot be removed from office. This pattern has continued to the present day. If you create a WhatsApp group chat, Facebook group, or Discord server, you are the permanent and eternal god emperor of that community, unless you voluntarily give it up. CU Boulder professor Nathan Schneider calls this implicit feudalism.
Online platforms have not just taken advantage of this, but turned it into a virtue. Guardianship, a concept that goes back to Plato and Lenin, argues that societies will be most successful if they grant absolute authority to a small minority of people who are identified and trained as moral and technical leaders [of the Trust and Safety team]. Democracy makes no sense in this model, because most people [outside the company] cannot understand what is in the best interest of society [on the platform], and so are not qualified to govern [their own communities].
This attitude has metastasized into CEO arrogance that is now a threat to modern democracy. Weird right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel looks wistfully back to the economic inequality and racism of the 1920s. Palantir CEO Alex Karp asks us to be more thankful toward our self-appointed leaders as they pursue hard power and blur foreign and domestic threats.
Teaching a generation that they are powerless online primes them to obey authoritarians in real life.
Online platforms should be subject to the laws of the communities they serve, not the will of their owners
To win back our rights, we need to look to Magna Carta. No, really. Ratified (under threat) by King John of England in 1215, Magna Carta is a foundational document of democracy in the UK, the US, and around the world. The most famous clauses, still part of English law today, guarantee due process and the rule of law.
No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go against him, nor will we send against him, save by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice.
Forcing King John to acknowledge “the law of the land” was a radical act. Before this, England was usually referred to as the “kingdom” or the “realm,” which implied that the country was a creation of the king and there could be no laws apart from his will. “Law of the land” established that the country of England existed apart from the king, and could have laws that even the king had to obey.
We need the same radical reframing to win our rights online. The millions of active users of a platform are not serfs beholden to the company that operates it, and creators are not personal vassals of platform CEOs. Our friends, interests, and organizational affiliations exist independently of social media, and our online connections are deeper and more profound than any one company’s software and servers.
To modern CEOs, this probably sounds just as radical as “law of the land” did to King John back in 1215. But corporate law is not the divine right of kings. When Mark Zuckerberg incorporated TheFacebook, Inc. in 2004, the state of Delaware did not grant him absolute authority to unilaterally govern the social lives of billions of people worldwide forevermore. “The law of the land” online should be based on our social contract with each other. Not the will of a founder who happened to have a good idea in their dorm room or access to investment capital twenty years ago.
The first pillar of online democracy: credible exit
The first step to reclaiming our rights online is credible exit: the freedom to move our social graph and communities to another platform if we are dissatisfied.
Exit is part of economist Albert Hirschman’s model for how people let organizations know that they have started to deteriorate (worse products, poor governance, etc). Quitting a group is a strong signal that something is wrong. Credible exit is also a building block of participatory governance. As David Stasavage writes in The Decline and Rise of Democracy, “Whenever the populace found it easier to do without a particular ruler—say by moving to a new location—then rulers felt compelled to govern more consensually.”
Platforms today make Exit difficult or impossible. They treat it as a competitive threat. Facebook more or less killed the Vine short-video app by cutting off its access to their friend graph. Even when you can download your data, it’s in a crippled form that can’t be uploaded and used anywhere else. A copy of your social media posts and videos sitting on your local device is not social any more. It’s just media.
Exit is something we can fix. The US has required mobile phone number portability since 2003. The proposed US ACCESS act would bring something similar to social media. The open social web movement has already started rolling out useful tools for account migration. And a promising long-term solution is decentralized identity, where you own and control your own data, and can decide which platforms have access to it.
The second pillar of online democracy: transparent due process
The second step toward fairness online is transparent due process in account terminations. The right to a public trial is a key bulwark against tyranny. The US Declaration of Independence specifically calls out King George III for “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury,” and the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the right to a fair trial, and no punishment without law.
Platforms have tried to normalize the practice of summary justice based on secret evidence, arguing that some online crimes are so dangerous that the accused criminals can’t be shown the evidence against them, lest that information help them evade future detection. This is fundamentally unjust. Platforms are ubiquitous and essential to our lives, which means our online accounts have become part of who we are. They should no longer be treated as an anonymous, arms-length transaction that can be entered into lightly and taken away at will.
Transparent due process would be good for platforms, not just people. It is a practical way to address trust through procedures by recognizing that a secret justice system can never deliver a sufficient level of correctness. Transparency would let people determine for themselves whether decisions are being made in good faith, and give them a path to identifying and fixing mistakes.
The third pillar of online democracy: separation of powers
The third step to online democracy is independence. We need to separate the safety function from business control. The health of a community cannot be reduced to a purely economic formula. This is why we have food hygiene inspectors, and why compliance is such a big deal in finance and medicine. In these cases, we have decided that sometimes, it’s better for a business to fail than to put people at an unacceptable level of risk.
We cannot rely on platforms to prioritize safety of their own accord. Without an external standard for what “safe enough” looks like, the CEO/monarch can always step in and choose profits over safety. Mark Zuckerberg was comfortable pausing ad enforcement work on scams and fraud coming from China, and Elon Musk was happy to put Twitter/X’s safety teams through the wood chipper.
Platform safety is too important to be entrusted to the platforms themselves. Safety professionals must be free to work in the public interest of the communities they serve. This requires transparency and accountability. We need representation in platform safety decisions that affect us and our communities. We deserve to understand platform rules and practices, to consent to changes, and to inspect these systems regularly, so we can be sure they are doing what they are supposed to and nothing more.
Internet platforms have become our unelected governments. They should be subject to the laws of the communities they serve, not the will of their owners.
Implicit feudalism and guardianship have led us to a world of surveillance, secret courts, and leaders who are free to choose profits over people. This autocratic Platformocracy cannot become our future. Our communities deserve the right to exit to another platform. We all deserve fair and transparent due process. Society deserves safety organizations that work for us, not for corporate interests.
I am under no illusions that online democracy will be easy or quick to build, but I am optimistic. The Internet is still very young, and I believe that the Platformocracy will turn out to just be an unfortunate developmental phase, like under construction GIFs or the Harlem Shake. Past technological revolutions, like the advent of printing in Western Europe, led to centuries of upheaval and change, but things did get better over time.
Even if it takes decades, I am confident that we will reclaim the voice and control we deserve in our online lives. I hope that this newsletter will help to bring that moment closer.
Thanks for joining me as I head into year two. Next week: “Trust and Safety with Chinese Characteristics.”
Human beings are only secure from evil at the hands of others in proportion as they have the power of being, and are, self-protecting.
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]. And please feel free to share this with anyone you think would be interested. Thanks.
