Governing digital societies: private platforms, public values

Abstract

Online digital platforms have deeply penetrated every sector in society, disrupting markets, labor relations and institutions, while transforming social and civic practices. Moreover, platform dynamics have affected the very core of democratic processes and political communication. After a decade of platform euphoria, in which tech companies were celebrated for empowering ordinary users, problems have been mounting over the past three years. Disinformation, fake news, and hate speech spread via YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook poisoned public discourse and influenced elections. The Facebook—Cambridge Analytica scandal epitomized the many privacy breaches and security leaks dogging social media networks. Further compounded by charges of tax evasion and the undermining of fair labor laws, big tech companies are facing a serious ‘techlash’. As some argued, the promotion of longstanding public values such as tolerance, democracy, and transparency are increasingly compromised by the global ‘exports’ of American tech companies which dominate the online infrastructure for the distribution of online cultural goods: news, video, social talk, and private communication (Geltzer & Gosh, 2018). As extensively discussed in our book ‘The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connected World’, the digitization and ‘platformization’ of societies involve several intense struggles between competing ideological systems and their contesting actors, prompting important questions: Who should be responsible for anchoring public values in platform societies that are driven by algorithms and fueled by data? What kind of public values should be negotiated? And how can European citizens and governments guard certain social and cultural values while being dependent on a platform ecosystem which architecture is based on commercial values and is rooted in a neolibertarian world view?