Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

Gaffey, Adam J.

doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.23.4.0771

Cited by 13 publications

(18 citation statements)

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“…As the previous subsection discussed, these often directly conflict with the public interest: for example, former Facebook employees have claimed that company executives repeatedly rejected product changes designed to avoid showing users harmful content because they would reduce engagement (Hao, 2021). 9 Social media platforms are frequently accused of promoting such content because it attracts user engagement, thus maximising time on site, data collection and ad revenue (Vaidhyanathan, 2018a;Bennett et al, 2021;Barrett and Hendrix, 2022). Given the diversity among platforms and user experiences, it is impossible to confidently claim or disprove that platforms generally and consistently promote such content (Silverman, 2022).…”

Section: Unequal Accountabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Public and private power in social media governance: multistakeholderism, the rule of law and democratic accountability

Griffin

2023

Transnational Legal Theory

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Social media platforms trouble established ideas about the public/private divide. Due to their size, political influence, and abilities to regulate speech at scale, the largest platforms are often compared to governments. Consequently, their unaccountability to the public has prompted widespread concern. This article examines and critiques two related though distinct responses to this tension in academic and policy debates, here characterised as the multistakeholderist and rule of law responses. The multistakeholderist response aims to increase civil society's influence in platform governance through transparency, consultation and participation. The rule of law response -which is increasingly influential in Europe -extends the platform/state analogy to argue that platform governance should follow the same rule of law principles as public institutions.This article evaluates both responses' abilities to make social media platforms more democratically accountable, concluding that both are limited. Both reflect a 'tech exceptionalism' which understands social media companies as different from other companies, and therefore requiring special accountability mechanisms. The proposed solutions -subjecting platforms only to accountability from other private actors, or subjecting them to the same principles as statesoverlook the insights of legal realism and law and political economy: that corporate power is constituted by state regulation. Both responses aspire to strengthen democratic accountability without substantially changing the legal foundations for digital markets or the market structures they have produced, which is unlikely to succeed. Multistakeholderist initiatives will likely exacerbate unequal participation, since abilities to influence platforms through market pressure, public criticism and consultation are highly unequally distributed. Rule of law approaches implicitly approve vast concentrations of corporate power, provided they follow rule of law principleswhich are designed to constrain presumptively democratic states, not to ensure corporations act in the public interest.Instead, the article advocates reforms guided by an ideal of economic democracy, which emphasises democratic control over markets and aims to redistribute ownership and control of media and communications infrastructure. This suggests two areas for intervention: substantive legal constraints on corporate activities such as surveillance advertising, and reforms aiming to promote pluralism in online media by reducing market concentration and providing non-commercial or public-service digital infrastructure.

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Section: Unequal Accountabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Public and private power in social media governance: multistakeholderism, the rule of law and democratic accountability

Griffin

2023

Transnational Legal Theory

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“…One of the ways platforms have resisted regulation has been by perpetuating the myth that their businesses exist for the public interest functioning as neutral infrastructure (Napoli & Caplan, 2017). However, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal where Facebook user data was used to micro-target voters and influence elections, far more media and academic discourse started to position data rights as inherently valuable-and giving them to Facebook to use a 'free' platform started to look like less and less like a benevolent deal (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). In Australia, the act of banning news once again threw off Facebook's 'civic cloak', to reveal that business models based on user content and data do not guarantee that decisions would be made in the public interest.…”

Section: The Public Response To the Codementioning

confidence: 99%

Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and the global turn towards platform regulation

et al. 2022

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Governments across the world are struggling to address the market dominance of technology companies through increased regulation. The Australian Federal government found itself leading the world in platform regulation when, in 2021, it enacted the Australian News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code. The furore surrounding the introduction of the legislation, and Facebook's subsequent Australian 'news ban' exposed the limits of a regulatory model that has previously left the tech industry to moderate itself. In this paper, we argue the introduction of the Code is a leading example of a global trajectory towards regulatory change, which sees governments move from a reactive regulation model to specific interventions around the governance of digital media spaces. We discuss how best to measure the successes and failures around this more interventionist model through a case study of the implementation of the Code in Australia. More broadly we consider how global platforms have responded, and whether the reform is an effective regulatory model for other national governments to emulate.

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“…It is worth pausing and reflecting on how new all this is. FB 6 was launched in 2004 but many internet experts say that new media landscape and domination of social media did not take hold until 2012, only 10 years ago (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). The alarm bells, however, really started going off across the globe in 2016, only 6 years ago (Freelon & Wells, 2020).…”

Section: The Good News: Knowledge Mobilization and Platform Self‐regu...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Wrecking the public sphere: The new authoritarians’ digital attack on pluralism and truth

Kopstein

2022

Constellations

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Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

Public and private power in social media governance: multistakeholderism, the rule of law and democratic accountability

Public and private power in social media governance: multistakeholderism, the rule of law and democratic accountability

Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and the global turn towards platform regulation

Wrecking the public sphere: The new authoritarians’ digital attack on pluralism and truth

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