What we must regulate when we regulate social media platforms

Context: Human society has yet to completely adjust to the new power centres (i.e. transnational technology platforms) of the Information Age, and all states (from autocracies to liberal democracies) are in their own ways contending with the challenges of how to limit, constrain, regulate and harness them.

Challenges for liberal democracies to regulate Big Tech platforms:

• Affecting cognition: By controlling the content and flow of information, they—and their users—can shape what people think, believe and do.
• Exploiting loopholes in human cognition: rational decisions of the people are being manipulated by political parties, religious organizations, firms, and Big Tech.
  • This raises questions about the presumption of the liberal democracies that people make rational decisions in the free market.

Response of liberal democracies:

• Regulating various aspects of the information domain: primarily through surveillance, restrictions on free speech and protection of rights.
  • Concerns: may lead to politicization, partisanship, and injustice. Unlike big tech, one can’t disagree and opt-out of government rules.
• Use anti-trust regulation by invoking competition laws: to curb the market power of Big Tech platforms. E.g.: breaking up Facebook Inc., might reduce its political power and slow down spread of hate and bigotry temporarily.
  • Concerns: it destroys value for everyone, including consumers.

Way forward:

• Focus on regulating narrative power of big tech platforms:
  • Platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube though do not exercise editorial over what is published but control what users see.
• Enable algorithmic competition: All platforms that cross a certain threshold of active users could be mandated by law to open up to such competition.
  • E.g.: users on social media platforms should be able to choose how they want to order their feeds.
  • It would require them to open up their platforms to third-party algorithm providers, who are, in turn, subject to transparency and disclosure requirements.
• Make it mandatory for platforms to open their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for access by third-party clients, which could then offer competing filtration algorithms.

Conclusion: The problem is political, not economic, and the way to tackle it is to use competition to limit narrative power, not market power of Big Tech companies.