Tech Firms and Their Poor Performance as Democratic Gatekeepers

The third speaker in this opening plenary at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is the great Daniel Kreiss, who shifts our focus to the role of tech firms in the context of democratic challenges. They may be seen as ‘democratic gatekeepers’, potentially playing a crucial role in keeping anti-democratic leaders and parties from power. Democracies are saved when there are strong political institutions to save them, but these institutions need to include media organisations and platforms as well.

Journalists are ‘civil gatekeepers’, then, who communicate ideas to the public about what is and is not democratic; when this gatekeeping function fails, as it did in the bothsidesing media coverage of the 2016 US presidential election, democracy is threatened.

Platforms, too, play a critical role here: they have a governance interest to operate in democracies since these provide a comparative autonomy, and comparative legal and regulatory clarity that autocracies do not; a financial interest since operating within democracies will generate more revenue in the longer term; a human rights obligation to protect vulnerable users’ rights; and a democratic obligation to protect democratic publics and processes.

But they have performed this role extremely unevenly. 2020/21 was the pinnacle for electoral content moderation in many nations, with global trust and safety teams, policies against electoral disinformation, enforcement against violations of such policies, and deplatforming of anti-democratic politicians including Donald Trump. But this moderation varied in quality significantly across countries, and since 2022 these policies have been gradually rolled back, for various reasons.

Platforms policies are generally guided by ‘free speech’ values, which follows business, organisational, political, and democratic logics – it’s cheaper and easier to moderate less, does not offend either side of politics, and implements a particular view of democracy as related to freedom of expression. However, individual freedom of expression, when abused, tends to silence collective expression, and this is regularly exploited by anti-democratic (and most often far-right) actors.

What would democracy-worthy policies look like, then? Several aspects need to be addressed: pursue trust and safety through the lends of fair elections as a political ideal; collective democratic rights trump individual rights to expression; treat attempts to strategically undermine public faith in democratic elections as inherent violations of democratic norms; treat election denial as fundamentally different from other trust and safety issues; apply greater democratic norms on political actors; implement power-conscious policies that account for differences between social groups; and account for country-specific threats to democracy.

At present, platforms’ civic and election integrity policies do not vary from country to country; they use generic approaches to moderation and enforcement that do not recognise long-term attempts to undermine democratic processes; and they interpret their policies very flexibly. Often, they also include a high-value user exemption, holding political leaders to lower standards than ordinary users. They also fail to prohibit any claims to the illegitimacy of previous elections, even though such claims are clearly cumulatively undermining citizen trust in democratic processes.