Governments and consumers expect internet platform companies to regulate their users to prevent fraud, stop misinformation, and avoid violence. Yet, so far, they've failed to do so. The inability of platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon to govern their users has led to stolen elections, refused vaccines, counterfeit N95s in a pandemic, and even genocide. Such failures stem from these companies' inability to manage the complexity of their userbases, products, and their own incentives under the eyes of internal and external constituencies. The Networked Leviathan argues that countries should adapt the institutional tools developed in political science to democratize the major platforms. Democratic institutions allow knowledgeable actors to freely share and apply their understanding of the problems they face while leaders more readily recruit third parties to help manage their decision-making capacity.
Author(s): Paul Gowder
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2023
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF | Full TOC
Pages: 258
Tags: Computer Science; Computing And Society; Law; Law And Technology; Science; Communication
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Perils of Platform Misgovernance
What Is “Platform Governance” Anyway?
Why and How Do Platforms Govern?
Political Governments Can Help Platforms Govern
Platforms Need the Help: They Are Often Unable to Govern Their Users
Scholars Have the Tools to Improve Platform Governance: Borrowing from Political Governance
Where We’re Going
Appendix to Introduction: Addressing Some Ethical Challenges
1 The Nature and Problems of Platforms
1.1 The Core Features of Platforms
1.1.1 Positive Network Externalities
1.1.2 Interactive Network Affordances
1.1.3 Skim as a Revenue Model and Incentives to Scale (and Maybe Concentration)
1.1.4 Recommender Algorithms
1.1.5 Virality (with a Caveat)
1.1.6 Diversity of People and of Behavior
1.2 Platform Problems Are Like State Problems: There Are Lessons to Be Borrowed
2 The Enterprise of Platform Governance Development
2.1 Why Is Conduct on Platforms So Hard to Regulate?
2.2 Why Build Capacity?
2.3 How to Build Capacity?
2.4 Objection 1: Is Private Governance an Oxymoron or a Danger?
2.5 Objection 2: Does Platform Capacity Building Over-empower the Already Powerful? Is It Colonial? Imperial?
2.5.1 Mitigating Platform Neocolonialism
2.5.2 Facebook Probably Shouldn’t Have Been in Myanmar at All
2.5.3 Dispersing Power: Simultaneously a Governance Reform and an Anti-colonial Measure?
2.6 Objection 3: The Whole Industry Is Bad – Radically Remake It by Force
2.7 A Cautionary Approach to Antitrust Law
3 The Problem of Platform Knowledge
3.1 The Problem of Knowledge: A Pervasive Challenge for Centralized Governors of Dispersed Populations in Changing Environments
3.2 The Democratic, Decentralized Solution to the Knowledge Problem
3.3 Participatory Governance Facilitates Legibility
3.4 The Polycentric Mechanics of Decentralized Participation
3.5 A Design Criterion for Any Polycentric Platform System: Adaptive Capacity
4 The Problem of Platform Self-control
4.1 Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t Plotting to Fix the Election for Your Political Enemies, I Promise
4.1.1 Sometimes Failures of Self-control Are Just Failures of Corporate Governance
4.2 Can Platforms Commit Themselves to Govern Consistently?
4.2.1 Lessons in Self-binding from Political Science
4.3 Organizational Tools for Self-binding
4.3.1 Independent Enforcers (Like the Meta Oversight Board?)
4.3.2 The Political Foundations of Credible Commitment: Recruiting Workers and Ordinary People to Backstop Self-binding
4.3.3 User-Generated Sanctions for Company Commitment
4.4 Toward Platform Rule of Law
5 Actually Existing Platform Self-constraint … Up to a Point: The Meta Oversight Board
5.1 What Functions Might the Oversight Board Serve? Does It Do So Well?
5.2 A Defense of the Oversight Board’s Treatment of the Trump Case
5.2.1 How the Oversight Board’s Trump Decision Serves as a Counterexample to Carl Schmitt
5.2.2 Can Platforms Have a Constitutional Identity?
5.3 Can Platforms Have a Liberal-Democratic Identity?
5.3.1 Toward Participatory Platform Identity
6 Platform Democracy Now!
6.1 Can Platforms Be Governed Democratically without States?
6.1.1 Against Naive Participation
6.2 What Would Effective Democratic Platform Governance Look Like?
6.2.1 Overlapping Governance Entities at Multiple Scales
6.2.2 Genuine Empowerment of Workers, Users, and Nonusers
6.2.3 Iterative Stakeholder Inclusion and Experimentation
6.2.4 Robustness, of a Sort
6.2.5 Robustness against Bottom-Up as well as Top-Down Threats
6.3 Democracy within a Single Platform: A Sketch for Reddit
6.4 A Democratic Constitution for Global Social Media
6.4.1 Application: Managing Cross-cultural and Intracultural Social Conflict
6.5 Is Any of This Realistic?
6.5.1 Recognizing and Mitigating the Limits of Platform Constitutionalism
Conclusion: How Liberal-Democratic Governments Can Act Now
Interventions on the Platform Workplace
Interventions on Platform Information
Interventions on Human Rights Law
Interventions on Competition Policy
References
Index
