Platforms as Public Domain: The Authority Problem

• In Event: Social Media Platforms: A Crisis of Democracy?

Abstract

Platforms can be interpreted as many things, but, from the perspective of social theory, they are best seen as spaces designed to ensure that everyday social life interfaces with economic forces as seamlessly as possible. As such, platforms necessarily generate for their owners and controllers unexpected challenges of “managing,” in some sense, issues that are unresolved in social life: what is the appropriate boundary between public, semi-public and private life? How can the quality of public life be protected? The recent fake news and hidden ad subsidy scandals are examples of the latter. Yet commercial platforms lack any social authority for resolving such problems. So far, they are at best seeking to substitute management tools what is at root a normative, indeed a political, problem: what responsibility should a public take for its commons of ideas and information? Even more problematically, platforms that operate on the scale of Facebook seek legitimacy in how they manage aspects of the new public domain, legitimacy which in the end depends on authority on a scale which no national government, not even China’s, has to sustain. Platforms’ “authority problem” poses challenges not just for platforms, but also for political and social theory to address. What would be needed, in terms of social and institutional processes, to generate consensus for any authority that sought to regulate the public domain on the scale of billions of users? Where would those processes take place? How would they be configured? The paper will address these questions, drawing on the public pronouncements of Facebook and Zuckerberg’s February 2017 manifesto in particular.

Author

• Nick Couldry, London School of Economics & Political Science