Toward Platform Democracy: Imagining an Open-Source Public Service Social Media Platform

Abstract

The dangers posed to democracy by unregulated social media platforms have become clear in recent years. However, attempts to regulate platforms to limit the spread of harmful content and disinformation need to be informed by an understanding of the structural features of platforms that make such dangers difficult to avoid. The amplification of polarizing tendencies is the result of the basic structure of commercial platforms, and a better way to deal with them might be to replace privately owned commercial platforms with ones whose structure allows them to be accountable to the public and to their users. This essay explores the possibility of using policy supports to develop a platform based on distributed, open-source protocols that would serve to support democratic forms of communication.