What Is The Platformocracy?

Platformocracy is a newsletter about how the quest for online safety has turned tech companies into unelected governments, and how a few dedicated people are trying to invent something better. I want to tell this story because I lived it for decades as a product management executive at DoubleClick and Google, and while helping to found the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard. I’m eager to share what I’ve learned and the people I’ve met across many fields including technology, business, academia, and politics.

What is the Platformocracy?

I don’t think I’m the first person to use this term, but I want to popularize it as shorthand for the way that tech companies don’t answer to us, just like an autocratic government doesn’t answer to its citizens. Think I’m overstating it? Just ask anyone you know who’s tried to report harassment, or had their account suspended. You’ll get an earful about opaque processes, arbitrary decisions, and useless appeals that are almost always denied. People either give up, or make a stink in the press and hope the bad PR gets someone’s attention. They might as well be petitioning Emperor Zuckerberg or the YouTube Council of Elders to grant them a boon.

How did this happen?

The Platformocracy is a product of bad actors and good intentions. When humanity went online, crime and conflict came along for the ride. This was a big problem for tech companies. They were founded on idealistic goals like “organize the world’s information” or “bring the world closer together,” not “help violent extremists recruit new followers more efficiently” or “make it easier for international con artists to steal money from lonely people.”

The companies authentically wanted to do the right thing and keep people safe, so they invested in security and counter-abuse technology. The problem is, they ignored their greatest asset — the passionate communities who had built their lives, business, and identities around their products. Occasional advisory boards or a community notes feature around the margins isn’t the same as a real voice and a real stake.

This is where the trouble started.

Tech companies claimed total law-making authority over how people used their products, under terms like “community guidelines,” “terms of service,” or “codes of conduct.”

As they grew to massive size, they built enormous bureaucracies and surveillance systems to set policies and detect violators, with vague and reassuring names like “Trust and Safety,” “Integrity,” or “Quality.”

They normalized 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 and do more crimes.

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.

Unfortunately, we can’t just turn off the Platformocracy and hope everything works out. The bad guys and trolls really are out there, attacking people millions of times a day. Completely ungoverned online spaces either die, or end up as decaying civilizations dominated by warlords out of a Mad Max movie. We need new ideas to protect and improve our online lives not by abandoning the fight, but by making platform protection and governance as transparent, responsive, and accountable as our ideals of democratic governance. 

Internet Episode IV: A New Hope*

^{*Original Trilogy references are a dated cliché, but I’m old enough to have seen Star Wars in theaters in 1977, so that’s what you get. I’ll quote A Minecraft Movie or something next, to freshen things up. Chicken jockey! There.}

Fortunately, the work of inventing something better has begun. Original thinkers in academia have proposed new approaches to governance; public-minded engineers are building systems that bring these ideas to life; and pioneering small communities are putting participatory deliberation practices to the test. This newsletter aims to help you understand the trends and get a better idea of what comes next.

From a historical perspective, the Internet is still very young, so with any luck, over a long enough timeline, the Platformocracy will turn out to just be an unfortunate developmental phase, like the Hamster Dance or planking. It might take decades, but I am confident that we will reclaim the voice and control we deserve in our online lives, and I hope that this newsletter will help to bring that moment closer. Thanks for joining me.

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].