Platform Responsibility, and the Curation of Public Discourse

• In Event: Algorithms, Public Culture, and Platform Responsibility

Abstract

As Communication and related disciplines turn their attention to the networked information environment, important questions have emerged about the politics and ethics of social media platforms. From out of the once wide-open web, social networking sites, search engines, and content archives have installed themselves as privately-controlled intermediaries of online public discourse. They are now crucial sociotechnical structures for public culture (van Dijck, 2013). While they continue to present themselves as facilitators of democratic participation, concerns have grown about specific violations of that promise: privacy breaches and government surveillance, ham-fisted attempts to monetize users, and breaches of ethics and implicit contract.

These worries often revolve around specific incidents, making it hard to ask the broader questions: what would it mean to hold social media platforms responsible for the activity of their users and for their role in organizing, curating, and profiting from it? How do we want platforms to police our conduct online, and what are the implications of them doing so? In what ways have they already embraced responsibilities for public speech and sociality, and on what presumed values? If platforms are to intervene on behalf of the public they serve, what legal, ethical, or socio-cultural principles should frame that responsibility? In this essay I will consider some possible frameworks, including:

• as a specific subset of corporate responsibility;
• as an analog to democratic governance;
• as an upgrade of traditional media obligations to the public interest;

This question certainly must consider the essential role that algorithms play in the structuring and functioning of these communication platforms (Gillespie, 2014). Algorithms are oblique, both as sophisticated technologies and as corporate secrets. They are central to the way information is organized, selected, and delivered. And they often provide rhetorical cover for arrangements that are, in reality, both human, technical, and institutional. They may force us to shift how we think about agency and obligation, in any call for platform responsibility:

• as analogue to the obligations of editors, tastemakers, and experts;
• as a form of "architectural" mechanisms of control;
• as a form of "nudge" policy for social choreography.

Author

• Tarleton L. Gillespie, Cornell U