Make Social Media Social Again: How Platform Interoperability Can Fix Social Media and Future-Proof Democracy

Abstract

This essay argues that social media document (rather than fuel) the decline of political democracy while helping revive organizational democracy, including through ‘decentralized autonomous organizations’ (DAOs). Yet, despite giving everyone a voice and the ability to organize across borders, social media could over-concentrate power if, in the future, a few large but siloed platforms ended up shrinking viewpoint diversity – the oxygen of democracy. How can we curb corporate platform concentration without dulling democracy? Due to trade-offs in platform design, no single service can deliver free speech, free usage, and safe usage simultaneously. Fortunately, this ‘trilemma’ can be transcended at the industry level with an interoperability mandate that fosters user multihoming and lets various platforms provide different bundles of democratic benefits. Email works across service providers, and so can social media. Interoperability thus represents a viable answer based on six advantages: practical feasibility; competition on merit; faster complementor innovation; jurisdictional flexibility; unlocking network effects between, rather than just within platforms; and alignment with democratic values. Platform interoperability can make social media social again and future-proof democracy. This proposal is a clarion call for blaming the Internet a little less for democracy’s problems and instead leveraging its infrastructure strategically to address them.