Think Piece: Why Platforms Shouldn’t be Publicly Controlled

Why Platforms Shouldn’t be Publicly Controlled

When digital platforms are under private control, public interests suffer. Elections are less free and fair – just consider Elon Musk’s boosting Trump over X. And the allure of ever greater private profit has left platforms like Facebook and Amazon addictive, dangerous, and monopolistic.     

So, should platforms instead be publicly controlled? It’s tempting to answer ‘Yes’. Public control seems naturally aligned with public interests because it empowers people to take care of themselves. 

Yet I think we should answer ‘No’. I base my view on the modest rule that we must use our words in a way that doesn’t make people reasonably feel manipulated or deceived. Call this rule Conscientious Communication. 

There are at least two reasons we ought to follow this rule. First, respecting people as fellow participants in society (as opposed to things we can push around) requires adhering to Conscientious Communication. Second, in her seminal article ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’ , Sherry Arnstein observes that calls for participatory governance often involve manipulation or deceit. Promoting Conscientious Communication would reduce such occurrences. 

Following Conscientious Communication nevertheless demands a surprising amount of caution. It might not seem manipulative or deceptive to promise public control of a platform and make it controlled by the government. But doing so would break the rule with respect to people like political scientist James Muldoon, for whom government control “simply replaces private oligarchs with distant bureaucrats” . 

The safe route to following Conscientious Communication is accordingly to interpret ‘public control’ literally. Under this interpretation, the conditions for public control and control by Elon Musk are roughly the same. A platform is controlled by Musk just when however Musk prefers the platform to be, so it is. Similarly, a platform is controlled by the public just when however the public prefers the platform to be, so it is. 

Now, let’s consider whether platforms should be publicly controlled in this literal sense. We face at least five problems with remedies that count against public control. 

First, if platform control were open to the public, we should expect most people to rationally make uninformed decisions given the low impact anyone will have. The remedy is to restrict control to be from small groups drawn from the public. 

Second, decisions about platforms are complex and require technical knowledge these groups may lack. The remedy is to give their members special training to ensure they base decisions on specialized information.

Third, these groups may have personal interests misaligned with the general public. The remedy is to carefully curate their composition to track public interests.

Fourth, carefully curated groups remain vulnerable to ill-willed members whose biases can influence decisions. The remedy is to regulate acceptable input from group members to mitigate harmful attitudes.

And fifth, these groups are also vulnerable to manipulation by businesses and special interests. The remedy is to insulate them from external pressures, much like juries.

Let’s take stock. Calling control by groups that are heavily restricted in size, specially trained, carefully curated, regulated in their input, and insulated from influence control by the public breaks the Conscientious Communication rule. As philosophers like Christina Lafont have observed, the situation is better described as control by some group of private citizens, albeit ones who may act in the public’s interests. 

Overall, we should be Conscientious Communicators. So, let’s not deceive and manipulate ourselves: platforms shouldn’t be publicly controlled.  
 

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash