Interpreting the User: Technology Firms’ Limited Imaginations of Their Democratic Responsibilities

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

Abstract

We build on our work around how technology firms actively shape political communication (Kreiss & McGregor, 2017) to argue that Facebook, Google, and Twitter have simplistically imported their commercial models for working with brands into the political domain. As a result, these firms have roundly and routinely failed to consider the ways that consumer choices are different from political choices, to think through their democratic obligations and responsibilities, or respond to the strategic political manipulation of public discourse.

We focus on the consequences of how these firms rhetorically situate the “user.” We take as our object of study the discourses that inform and shape routine practices inside these firms and legitimate their work for external actors in the United States, where they are headquartered. Drawing on observational and interview data from interactions with employees of these firms, in addition to public documents including Federal Election Commission and amicus brief filings and the public writings of employees and postings on public-facing websites, we show how the concept of “users” is differentially invoked rhetorically for internal and external audiences. These firms hold up an abstract “user” to argue for the experiences and functionalities that people desire of their platforms, much in the same way that the “reasonable person” standard functions in the context of law as a rhetorical construction of how a fictional, typical person would exercise their judgment. Internally, employees invoke different ideas of the “user” to argue for various courses of action, such as playing an editorial role to restricting certain forms of speech. This is a social construction, not one based on empirical evidence, and various constructions of the “user” conflict (i.e. “the user wants free speech” versus ‘the user wants a non-harassing environment”).

In these various constructions of the “user” there is a lack of consideration of the dimensions of citizenship or the unique domain of politics as a distinct sphere in social life. Furthermore, in using the rhetorical “user” as an interpretively flexible principle for decision-making, firms externally attempt to symbolically relieve of themselves of agency or responsibility for the role they play in politics.

Authors

• Daniel Kreiss, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Shannon C McGregor, University of Utah