Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.

Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. You know, I remember way back when I was in law school, which seems like the dark ages. You know, CDT was already there. I remember admiring the organization's work on the Communications Decency Act. And now Wow. Here we are decades later.

Yeah. So I think that when we sort of focus in the day to day on all of these problems that, like, social media and other platform y kind of companies, you know, sort of on on the problems in the world that seem to arise from behavior on these platforms that we have this habit to do so in a really narrow way. Like, oh, you know, the real issue is privacy. Oh, you know, the real issue is the commodification of people's data. Oh, you know, the real issue is government censorship. And there hasn't really been an opportunity to pause and to step back and to really think, okay. What is it that both governments and, really, companies are trying to do in order to make what happens on these platforms compatible with the public interest? Like, how does what governments and companies try to do relate to the structure of human communication on these platforms. And, like, thinking about it, stepping back, and thinking about the problem from, like, first principles really, I think, gives us the chance to move forward and to try to understand what we actually should do to allow us to have the benefits of social media and things like it while mitigating some of the terrible harms that they cause.

Yeah. So there's really you know, the the the phrase platform governance is kind of multifaceted. A lot of people use the phrase to describe governance of platforms. Right? That is okay. You know, we have, like, the EU, and we have The US, and we have all of the other various countries that are regulators to one degree or another of credibility. And one thing that they're trying to do is regulate both what the companies that run platforms do and what individuals do on the platforms. But then there's this second sense, which is governance by platforms. That is, you know, a lot of scholars, you know, famously, for example, Kate Klonick has done a lot of work in this area. A lot of scholars have said, hey. Like, the things that these companies are doing, they kind of look a lot like the things that governments do. Right? I mean, it's it's yeah. I I think about Facebook because it's the company, I guess, Meta now. I still wanna call them Facebook, because it's the company that I know the most. You know, Bias Check, I spent some time consulting for them. We can talk about this, down the road if you want. But, you know, I think about how, like, they've got this incredibly law like system of content standards that, like, spans to, you know, hundreds of pages, is written by a team that's mostly consists of lawyers. You know, they have, like like, regular meetings, again, mostly among lawyers to update it, to add interpretations of it. Now there's, like, this Facebook Supreme Court, the Oversight Board, that, again, is, like, mostly composed of human rights lawyers, more or less. Right, like, it it it's it's like law and governance all the way down, but carried out by these private actors and, you know, sort of with the idea that they'll simultaneously operate something like a fair system of rules. But they're also like, they're doing it for a reason that's attached to their economic interests. Like, there's still companies trying to make a profit, so there's still this, like, underlying fact that the reason that they feel the need to run a something like a fair system of rules that, like, gives people notice about what's prohibited and tries to prevent really terrible things from happening is because it's, like, part of their self interest as a company trying to make a profit. So this idea of platform governance for me or what I try to unpack in the book is, like, what's the relationship between the fact that, a, we as a society and our governments want to control the consequences of these platforms, b, the companies themselves want to govern the virtual spaces that they manage. And, like, see, you know, there's this kind of alignment of interest so that we can think of one possible pathway towards solutions to some of the problems being that governments and the public and the companies work together in spaces where they have aligned incentives to actually bring it about that we can have social media platforms that are consistent with the public interest.

Yeah. So, I mean, I wanna push back a little bit on what this means exactly because, you know, one of the things about being an academic with kind of a grounding in reality, which I like to think of myself as having, is you know that there has been exactly one time in human history where political leaders sort of woke up and said, hey. There's this, like, academic, and, you know, we kind of just wanna directly implement what he says should be done into, like, structures of power and see what happens. Unfortunately, you know, I I mean, you know, say what you will about the virtues of Marxism, understood sort of carefully, like the one time when that happened, namely when Lennon did that. It didn't go so well. And so I I don't think that it's realistic or probably even desirable to expect that the program for democratizing platforms that I lay out toward the end of this book is something that would have, but just get sort of photocopied and written into a human rights treaty. You know, reality, these things require negotiation. They require lobbying. Right? Like, different interest groups demand to be included in ways that one didn't envision. And that's all good and healthy because that's also part of democracy. But that being said, fundamentally, what I think the idea is is ordinary people have two advantages over, like, people sitting in Menlo Park or Mountain View or wherever Elon brings the governance of the entity formerly known as Twitter this week. You know, God only knows. Texas somewhere. Like, ordinary people across the world have at least two distinct advantages over people sitting in company headquarters. Advantage number one is they tend to understand the implications of what happens on platforms and their own needs much better than people sitting in Menlo Park or Mountain View or wherever. You know, one of the things that we can't forget is that most of the terrible consequences that have happened as a result of social media have not been in The US. Like, yes, The US has experienced problems in social media too. I mean, you know, depending on how you attribute the Trump election in 2016 or not, which, I mean, is obviously, the jury's still out. '16 or not, which, I mean, is obviously the jury's still out on the extent of social media's role. I mean and, you know, obviously, also people disagree about whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. But, you know, like, fundamentally, none of that compares to the fact that in Myanmar, there was an ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people that was greatly facilitated by behavior over Facebook. And, like, everybody, including Mark Zuckerberg, acknowledges the company's culpability in that. Right? So I I think that point one is that whatever system of is created and, you know, I propose something like randomly selected and paid citizen juries in a fairly complex structure. But, again, that's really more of a model than anything else. But it needs to be something that gives ordinary people the capacity and the incentive to actually participate in making decisions about what happens on social media, about what the rules are, about how those rules are enforced. Not governments, not merely people and companies, but ordinary people. The second principle is that there needs to be what I think of as, like, novel centers of power. You know, a big part of the problem, one that we saw in Myanmar, one that we saw during the Trump administration, and arguably during the Biden administration as well in The United States, is governments and companies have incentives that aren't always fully aligned with the public good. You know, companies have short term profit incentives. Governments have incentives to suppress their political opponents. We've seen that all across the world. You know, I think about the Modi regime in India or about, the Duterte regime in The Philippines as key examples of this. And so, you know, in order to help companies not simply follow their short term profit interests against their long term profit interests. And in order, they illustrate decisions about the public interest from partisan incentives from whatever government happens to be in power in a particular place. What the other thing that democratizing platforms means is that we genuinely need to create new institutions that permit direct participation from the public. And, again, I'm kind of agnostic about the exact form of that. You know, in the book, I lay out this kind of complicated scheme involving essentially what amounts to randomly selected juries of individual people, and then, like, a system pretty much directly swiped from classical Athens, of higher with a little bit of The US court system and administrative law mixed in of sort of higher degrees of citizen assemblies that are brought into interaction with one another. And I have, like, legitimate social science backed reasons for promoting that specific structure. But I think that the overarching principles are more important

it is it possible? I mean, I think that yeah. That's that's I think it's a really good question. Honestly, I mean, I we do have examples of other situations. I mean, I I I think in the in the environmental world in particular, I think there's a lot of efforts to do what's known as sort of multistakeholderism, where, like, governments and NGOs and private enterprise work together to try to achieve common goals, for example, on climate change. We've seen a little bit of this in the Internet context. Of course, most classically, I can is sort of what are the prototype examples of multistakeholderism. Are any of these things perfect? Absolutely not. You know, is there always a perennial danger of these kinds of structures being dominated by one side or the other? Absolutely. But do they tend to be improvements on the available alternatives? Also, yes. Right? So it's like right now, you know, what we've got is sort of half companies operating with near impunity. I mean, I think, for example, about what happens every time a government tries to convince somebody to pay for news. And the other half, like, governments trying and occasionally getting away with crazy policies. Yeah. Again, I think of the actual policy of limitations of some of these pay for news schemes, which, like, you know, the Australian one was frankly insane, and I don't really blame Facebook for saying, we'll just stop carrying news then. You know, like, the like, there are no good answers in the current system. Like, our governments don't have the capacity to come up with fair and actually implementable regulations on their own, And the companies don't have an you know, that while the while in some ways they're aligned with the public interest, they're not well enough aligned with the public interest to be trusted to just keep doing what they're doing. And so I think we need to invent new ways of working together one way or the other.

in a lot of ways as, like, kind of my key case for this for a few reasons. One reason is just because some of the discourse about The Philippines and social media has been really weird and weird in ways that sort of implicate the, like, frankly, elitist nature of platform governance right now. So no. And then this is this is kind of backing into an answer to your question, but I promise I'll get to something that will be satisfactory sooner or later. No. Yeah. A couple years ago, there were a bunch of big news stories that were, like, you know, Facebook, for the first time ever, is, like, standing up at office with, like, teens in The Philippines because they're super worried about all of the nasty stuff that Rodrigo Duterte does. Like, basically, using Facebook, which has had a dominant position in the company's market. As I recall, it was one of the free basics countries where, like, Facebook basically subsidized, access to the service, I think. But so one of the things that was really striking to me I mean, the thing that was really striking to me about that was that there's a sense in which Facebook had already had an office in The Philippines with, like, lots of workers. It's just that those workers were offshored content moderators. And one of the things that you Mhmm. See when you read the accounts of the off shore content moderators that work for Facebook as well as for many of these other companies. I mean, you get really an impression of two big problems. Big problem number one is the one that the media and a lot of scholars have been focusing on, which, yes, is really severe, which is that the working conditions are terrible. Right? Like, imagine a job where you spend eight hours a day watching Animal Crush videos and, you know, something like that. Right? I mean, it's, like, it's it's gonna be traumatizing similar to participating in a war. But the other piece of it is that, you know, they tend to recount having, like, no capacity to influence decisions centrally. Right? Like, they they're, you know, managed by subcontractors, and they're it this, like, piece rate, kind of, like, super busy, not piece rate exactly, but, like, sort of, like, very sort of heavily, like, clocked and regulated environment. You know, there's there it's like a complete contrast to what it's like working in Menlo Park or Mountain View where, you know, you have, like, internal communication tools, and you talk to people who, like, have the same job as you as well as the people who have different jobs. And you have, like, influence over the direction that the products go. It's just a sort of completely disempowered thing. And bringing those two together, right, it just sort of, like, captured me. Right? Like, if like, Facebook thinks that having more of a clue of what's going on in The Philippines would allow them to do things like detect vote suppression ahead of time and do something about it and understand what kind of things were genuine political discussion and what kind of things were election interference. Right? If having those eyes on the ground of having that local understanding is what even the company perceived they need, well, that's something that democratization can create. And by the way, one piece of democratization can include and I think should include workplace democracy. That is, it can and should include genuinely empowering content moderators, giving content moderators a real route, a, to talk to one another and share their understandings of what they're seeing, and, b, to be people who have access to the panic button, who can say, like, hey. We've been seeing a lot of crazy rumors about this political figure. You know? Y'all should know. You know, we know because we're citizens of this country and we read the newspapers that this is garbage and that, you know, this is something where we can see the motivations going on, but maybe you can't see because you're in US and you don't even speak the language. Right, it's it's it's that kind of pathway. Like, so much of, like, the sort of operational difficulty of responding to things like election interference comes from not having the capacity to judge. Okay. Is this election interference, or is this real political debate? Frankly, it also comes from not having the moral authority to judge, is this electoral interference, or is this real political debate? Right? Like, people in Menlo Park and Mountain View don't even really have the right to say to the people in Philippines or the people in Kenya or wherever, well, that speech is not a fair player in your democracy whereas this speech is. And governments can't be given that authority because it's just going to be used to favor their own party. And so, like, democratization is particularly critical when we think about misinformation and election interference because only the local people both have a way to have an understanding of what's going on that's better than Menlo Park and Mountain View, but also actually have the right to say what counts as fair game and what doesn't count as fair game in their own democracies.

thoughts. You know, so one last closing thought is I do think that this is a lot more realistic than it sounds. I mean, one really cool thing about the tech industry is that companies have shown a really broad appetite toward experimentation. Right? Like, the Facebook oversight board exists or the Meta oversight board. And, I mean, you know, people can disagree about whether that was truly sincere or whether that was just, like, a way to keep regulatory heat off, yada yada yada. But, I mean, I think the the real fact of the matter is regardless of the motivations, it exists. And I actually argue in chapter five of this book that it's actually done some really good work. You know, companies have an appetite for innovation, and I think they recognize because it's in their interests too that they have a problem. So I do think that, you know, we're likely to find more willingness than we expect if the governments of the world and the companies of the world sort of sat down together and said, hey. Can can we create some way of giving ordinary people a say? Finally yeah. So the book is called The Networked Leviathan, for democratic platforms. It's open access, and so you can download a free PDF if you go to it's just networked-leviathan.com. Obviously, I'd prefer if you bought it so that I get my nickel in royalties, but I don't want payment to be a barrier from anyone having access to the ideas.