Most of the current societal conversation about the dangers social platforms pose to democracy has centered on the topical trio of filter bubbles, fake news and foreign interference. Yet, there is a far more dangerous threat to modern democracy that has remained largely under the radar: the absolute and unaccountable control social platforms increasingly wield over the connection between citizens and their elected officials, with private companies permitted to decide who is permitted to speak in the democratic process and what they are permitted to talk about. Even more troubling, governments like the US and EU that have focused intently on foreign interference have largely ignored the growing threat of Silicon Valley’s ability to interfere in democracy just as governments are poised to take on issues that threaten those companies’ business models.
It is one of the great truisms of the digital era that democracy itself is increasingly mediated through the private property of social media companies’ walled gardens.
Elected officials increasingly listen to and interact with their constituents directly through social platforms. As those platforms increasingly mediate the public’s understanding of national issues and global events, companies like Twitter and Facebook not only define reality itself but determine who is permitted to speak to their government and what they are permitted to say.
Twitter quite literally determines who is permitted to speak directly to the President of the United States today and can suspend that right from anyone at any time for any reason. It is also able to determine what topics those ordinary citizens are permitted to talk to their government about.
Issues that don’t conform to Twitter’s corporate beliefs can be banished, silencing wide swaths of the country from having their voices heard by those who represent them.
Democracy is built upon the free flow of information and the ability of a nation’s citizenry to have their voices heard. Social media done precisely the opposite: centralizing all control over who is heard and what they can say to a handful of utterly unaccountable for-profit companies whose power is absolute, whose decisions are final with no recourse and whose processes are entirely opaque.
Facebook reminded us of the power of social media companies to silence views that threaten their bottom lines when it removed an ad by Elizabeth Warren calling for greater regulation of its business practices. While the company ultimately blamed the ad’s removal on its use of Facebook’s logo, the fact remains that the company was under no legal obligation to restore the ad.
There is no guarantee of freedom of speech within the private walled gardens of the social behemoths that control our modern digital democracy. All of the rights, guarantees, privileges and freedoms assured citizens in the public square disappear when it comes to the private property in which the democratic process increasingly occurs.
What happens as Twitter suspends and expels users that no longer conform with its corporate beliefs? Their voices are no longer afforded the same rights in the democratic process as those whom Twitter agrees with and promotes. A flip of an algorithmic switch by Twitter ensures elected officials up through the President of the United States no longer hear about the issues of greatest concern to entire swaths of their nations.
These are no longer idle concerns.
Take Facebook’s active intervention in last year’s Pakistani election against one of the candidate parties. As the New York Times put it, “shortly before elections were held in July, Facebook issued its moderators a 40-page document outlining ‘political parties, expected trends and guidelines’ … [that] document most likely shaped those conversations … [of] one of the world’s largest and most fragile democracies … [with] moderators [being] urged in one instance to apply extra scrutiny to [one of the parties] [while] another religions party … was described as ‘benign’" and not subject to the more extensive moderation focus.
In the case of India, the company’s guidelines instruct moderators to “look out for” the slogan “Free Kashmir,” though the slogan is entirely legal.
In the case of Myanmar, despite publicly announcing a ban on praise of an organization that has promoted violence against Muslims, the company’s own internal guidelines actually instructed its moderators not to remove those laudatory posts. The company only brought its internal policies into line with its public statements after an inquiry from the Times, reminding us that Facebook’s public statements do not always match what it actually does behind closed doors.
Facebook’s list of banned “hate” groups include mainstream political parties that hold seats in both the European Union parliament and the governments of major European countries.
Quite literally, democratically elected political parties are being banned from the platform.
Similarly, across Asia and the Middle East, major religious groups that represent broad swaths of society also find themselves banned.
A private company has the absolute unquestionable and unaccountable power today to unequivocally ban democratically elected parties, prohibit mention of key societal issues and banish societal organizations representing broad swaths of entire nations.
More insidiously, a private company has actually taken the unprecedented step of actively intervening in a democratic election of a sovereign nation to interfere with what the public saw of the candidates, subjecting one party to intense moderation scrutiny, while another received no such enhanced censorship.
Asked to comment on the details of the Times’ reporting, a Facebook spokesperson criticized the Times as mischaracterizing some details, but declined to comment on which details of the story it objected to or to provide an alternative accounting. The company also declined to provide copies of the documents the Times had acquired to permit external review.
Most importantly, when asked “why does Facebook believe it is acceptable for it to determine what is acceptable speech across the world, instead of deferring to court systems, governments and other democratically or governmentally determined systems,” a spokesperson offered that “they’re definitely important questions” but that the company had no comment on them.
Asked for comment as to whether the European Union was taking seriously the power of social media platforms to influence European elections, a spokesperson for the European Commission offered that the EU was investing heavily in combatting hate speech and external influence on elections. However, when asked whether the EU was specifically working to protect elections from the inference of the social companies themselves, the spokesperson confirmed that there are no EU-wide initiatives at this time, reminding us of just how little attention governments have given to social media's power over democracy.
Putting this all together, it is not foreign interference that is the greatest threat to our digital democracy, it is the social platforms themselves and their unlimited and unaccountable power to determine who has a voice and what they may say.
We’ve focused all of our efforts on external abuse of social platforms, encouraged by the platforms as a way to shift blame, but the greatest threat has been right in front of us the entire time: the companies themselves.
Perhaps the biggest question of all is whether it is now simply too late for regulation, as the companies are now so powerful they could simply silence all debate and ensure the election of pro-Silicon Valley governments across the world.
Orwell would be proud.
