platform governance

Paris Marx is joined by Mathew Lawrence and Thomas Hanna to discuss the problems with platforms, why antitrust alone is not enough to fix them, and how we can encourage the creation of democratic platforms that serve the public good.

Mathew Lawrence is the founder and director of Common Wealth. He’s also the co-author of “Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown.” Preorder it now from Verso Books and follow him on Twitter as @DantonsHead.

Thomas Hanna is the research director at The Next System Project. He’s the author of “Our Common Wealth: The Return of Public Ownership in the United States.” Follow him on Twitter as @ThomasMHanna.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Mathew and Thomas wrote a new report with Nils Peters called “A Common Platform: Reimagining Data and Platforms.”
• Eric Levitz wrote about how venture capitalists are like US central planners.
• Dan Hind wrote a previous report called “The British Digital Cooperative.”

Where does the tech industries’ power lie? Are they “mind-control” platforms, as some have described them, capable of influencing everything from consumer choices to election results, or does their true threat to society lie in market concentration? 

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author, activist and journalist. Doctorow’s latest book, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, argues that big tech’s purported powers of manipulation and control, peddled to advertisers and based on an overcollection of our data, are essentially an illusion. “Being able to target cheerleaders with cheerleading uniform ads does not make you a marketing genius or a mind controller. It just makes you someone who’s found an effective way to address an audience, so that even though your ad may not be very persuasive, you’re not showing an unpersuasive ad to someone who will never buy a cheerleading uniform,” Doctorow explains. 

Doctorow’s view is that the threats to society that big tech present are far less sinister than tech critics such as Shoshana Zuboff and Tristan Harris make them out to be. Rather, the big fives’ monopolistic practices are the real issues to wrestle with.

In this episode of Big Tech, co-hosts David Skok and Taylor Owen discuss how our understanding of the impacts big tech has on society has shifted over the past year. Among these changes is the public’s greater awareness of the need for regulation in this sector.

In their conversation, David and Taylor reflect upon some of the major events that have contributed to this shift. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for better mechanisms to stop the spread of misinformation. And it has shown that social media platforms are capable of quickly implementing some measures to curb the spread of misinformation. However, the Facebook Oversight Board, which their guest Kate Klonick talked about in season 1, is not yet operational, and won’t be until after the US presidential election; even then, its powers will be limited to appeals rather than content oversight.

In July 2020, the big tech CEOs testified in an antitrust hearing before the US Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. “That moment,” Taylor Owen says, “represented a real turning point in the governance agenda.” This growing big tech antitrust movement is showing that law makers, now better prepared and understanding the issues more clearly, are catching up to big tech. The public is starting to recognize the harms alongside the benefits of these companies’ unfettered growth. In season 2, Matt Stoller spoke with David and Taylor about monopoly power, and how these modern giants are starting to look like the railroad barons of old.

From diverse perspectives, all the podcast’s guests have made the point that technology is a net good for society but that the positives do not outweigh the negatives — appreciating the many benefits that platforms and technology bring to our lives does not mean we can give them free rein. As Taylor explains, “When we found out the petrochemical industry was also polluting our environment, we didn’t just ban the petrochemical industry and ignore all the different potential positives that came out of it. We just said you can’t pollute any more.” With the technology sector embedded in all aspects of our democracies, economies and societies, it’s clear we can no longer ignore the need for regulation.

Concurrent with launch of the Trust & Safety Professional Association, Alexander Macgillivray and Nicole Wong provide context and suggestions forward as regulation, policy, and public awareness of content moderation and trust and safety issues evolve.

Audience Q&A follows the discussion.

Speaker Bios:

Alexander Macgillivray, aka “amac,” is curious about many things including law, policy, government, decision making, the Internet, algorithms, social justice, access to information, and the intersection of all of those. He was United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the last two plus years of the Obama Administration. He was Twitter‘s General Counsel, and head of Corporate Development, Public Policy, Communications, and Trust & Safety. Before that he was Deputy General Counsel at Google and created the Product Counsel team. He has served on the board of the Campaign for the Female Education (CAMFED) USA, was one of the early Berkman Klein Center folks, was certified as a First Grade Teacher by the State of New Jersey. He is proud to be a board member at Data & Society, Creative Commons, and Alloy.us, and an advisor to the Mozilla Tech Policy Fellows, and part of the founding team of the Trust & Safety Professional Association. https://www.bricoleur.org/

Nicole Wong develops tech international privacy, content, and regulatory strategies. She previously served as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Obama Administration, focused on internet, privacy, and innovation policy. Prior to her time in government, Nicole was Google’s Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, and Twitter’s Legal Director for Products. She frequently speaks on issues related to law and technology, including five appearances before the U.S. Congress. Nicole chairs the board of Friends of Global Voices, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting citizen and online media projects globally, and sits on the boards of WITNESS, an organization supporting the use of video to advance human rights; the Mozilla Foundation, which promotes the open internet; and The Markup, a non-profit investigative news organization covering technology. Nicole currently serves as co-chair of the Digital Freedom Forum. More info here: about.me/nwong.

Robyn Caplan is a Researcher at Data & Society, researching issues related to platform governance and content standards. Her most recent work investigates the extent to which organizational dynamics at major platform companies impacts the development and enforcement of policy geared towards limiting disinformation and hate speech, and the impact of regulation, industry coordination, and advocacy can play in changing platform policies. Her work has been published in journals such as First Monday, Big Data & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. She has had editorials featured in The New York Times, and her work has been featured by NBC News THINK and Al Jazeera. She has conducted research on a variety of issues regarding data-centric technological development on society, including government data policies, media manipulation, and the use of data in policing.