This paper presents two case studies of Facebook's rapid changes relating to international electoral politics: the "I'm a Voter" affordance and the platform's data and targeting capabilities. The article shows how Facebook changed with respect to its policies, procedures, and affordances, especially given the normative pressure exerted by journalists.Drawing from these case studies, we conceptualise continual and rapid change as "platform transience" and argue that it often arises from external pressure and economic considerations.Platform transience has significant implications for the ability of stakeholders to hold platforms accountable, raises significant issues for electoral fairness, and increases the potential for unequal political information environments.
This study provides a comparative survey of policymaking discourse in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2016 to 2020 around digital threats to democracy. Through an inductive coding process, it identifies six core ideals common in these two countries: transparency, accountability, engagement, informed public, social solidarity, and freedom of expression. Reviewing how these ideals are constructed in policy-making documents, we find differences in each country's emphasis, inconsistencies in how some democratic ideals are evoked and promoted, conflicts between different democratic ideals, and disconnects between empirical realities of democracy and policymaking discourse. There is a lack of clarity in what social solidarity, engagement, and freedom of expression mean and how they should be balanced; conceptions of an informed public are deeply fraught, and in tension with other ideals. We argue that policymaking discourse is often out of step with the growing literature which suggests that political conflicts between social groups, right-wing extremism, and antidemocratic actions increasingly taken by elites and parties are at the root of growing democratic crises. This state of policy-making discourse has important implications for attempts to pursue regulation and suggests the need for further reflection by policymakers on the democratic ideals they are solving for.
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