Digital Democracy Demands Distribution

By Anna Hope Lynch

May 5, 2022

Social media has gone from a minor hobby pursued by a handful of terminally online nerds to a cornerstone of society, all in the span of about 20 years. Social media lets friends connect with each other, and it's hard for most to imagine their social life without it. It's equally hard to imagine a successful business or government agency that doesn't use social media for outreach. Social media, at its best, provides a fantastic service that helps us to stay connected with family members and with important organizations. At its worst, however, it is highly susceptible to control from its owners. When such a great amount of power is consolidated in the hands of so few people, our society can start to run into real trouble. We've seen these platforms dampen political expression that they object to, demote content produced by people of color, crop out people with darker skin colors, cut off queer people from finances, share personal data with shady companies and government agencies, and the list goes on. These social media platforms clearly do not have our best interests in mind, only their profits.

With these problems in mind, many approaches have been made by social media upstarts to offer some sort of democracy. Reddit, for example, is built on a system of upvotes and downvotes, essentially moving control over content promotion from an unknowable algorithm to the platform's users. Facebook, for its part, once offered a system by which users could vote on changes to the platform, after a poll was reccomended by a comment with enough likes. Both of these platforms, however, are now characterized by scandal and control. The Reddit Administration has developed a renown for deleting subreddits, getting involved in the politics of individual communities, and marginalizing forums with large minority populations. Facebook's owner, Meta, has been implicated in data leakage scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, and its Instagram platform has been subject to criticism for its promotion of eating disorders in young women. These attempts at limited democracy have been unsuccessful in preventing the abuses of social media platforms.

The Junta Problem

One thing which these platforms share in common is their centralized nature. Both Reddit and Facebook are closed-source platforms, hosted on a single set of servers under a single company led by a single CEO, available at a single website. Even if a platform were to be set up as a complete and total democracy, the people who operate the server would still ultimately be in total control. They would be able to turn the service on and off at will, and may even find themselves forced to deactivate the service, either by disaster, poverty, or government inquisition. They could also, short of shutting it down, completely change all of the source code so that the platform now resembles a more typical social media experience. This is essentially what Facebook did in 2012 when they got rid of their election service. The ability of a system administrator to make sudden changes to a centralized platform make such platforms terrible candidates for any sort of digital democracy. It would be comprable to a sysadmin junta allowing a democratic civilian government to control things- as long as they don't get too rowdy.

The Engagement Problem

When we think about democracy in social media, Facebook's trial run with the system is one of the most prominent examples we can look to. What makes Facebook particularly interesting is that its democracy had some legal control over the platform, as written in the Facebook Terms of Service. However, Facebook faced the same problem that our democracy faces: voter turnout. In order for a Facebook election to be binding, at least 30% of Facebook users would be required to participate in the poll. How many people actually participated? Less than .4%. In fact, to hold an election, a given post needed to reach several thousand comments, a feat only achieved three times throughout Facebook's semi-democratic era. It was the lack of engagement in these elections that ultimately led Facebook to discontinue elections altogether, and it's not hard to see why. As a small, idealistic, agile tech start-up, having accountability to your users may not be out of the question, but as a Peter Thiel-backed tech giant, your investors will demand absolute sovereignty. The Facebook model of one, centralized, digital democracy based on private votes is an idealistic and misguided view of what a successful digital democracy will look like. It's impossible to keep a functioning digital democracy engaged when it has some 4 billion constituents, all fractured between 3000 mostly insular communities, as our modern platforms are. Think about how many Facebook groups and Twitter subcultures there are (Gay Twitter, MAGA Twitter, Furry Twitter, Gay MAGA Furry Twitter). Think about how many languages and dialects are spoken across the sprawling kingdom? Does it really make sense for them to all vote in and remain engaged with one single governance structure? I don't think so. The closest real world analogs, the African and European Unions, are both limited confederations of independent, sovereign states. Even India and the United States are ultimately still federations. There are no massive, purely centralized democracies.

The Networking Problem

Another problem with any sort of centralized, closed digital democracy comes in the form of the Network Effect. The Network Effect is the idea that services, especially communications services, gain value as more people use them. Social media is maybe the best example of the Network Effect out there. If you were to sign up for a social media account, nearly everyone and everything you might want to interact with is on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. While other social media platforms, like Pleroma, Truth Social, and Plurk do exist, they don't have enough users to draw additional users. This process compounds until you have a handfull of social media titans and very few other options. Beyond just joining a platform, the Network Effect also discourages users from leaving said platforms. If a user doesn't like a change in a platform, say, Elon Musk buying Twitter, they may not quite be free to leave unless a substantial number of the people they care about also are willing to do so. If a new democratic social media platform were to arise, it would face an uphill battle in recruiting new users. Centralized social media needs to attract large populations in order to truly work. Twitter wouldn't work if it had only 30 users. On the topic of joining and leaving, democracy extends beyond mob rule. Democracy, or at least liberal democracy as we know it, extends additional protections to minorities. In a social media environment, the main protection that someone can have is the ability to stop using a platform with no or few negative consequences. A centralized social media platform cannot guaruntee this right. When you leave a platform like Twitter or Facebook, you experience the Network Effect once again. You have now left a platform and are cut off from the people and services you want to connect to. A centralized service produces these avoidable conditions, locking people into the control of the services they have chosen. A centralized service, then, is incapable of producing real social media democracy.

How Distribution Can Solve These Problems

We now know the problems. Centralized social media is susceptible to control from server administrators, who can override democratically made decisions with a single command. Centralized democracies with diverse constituents typically fail to engage with and meet the needs of all said constituents. As consequence, most communities don't even engage with the most rare elections. Centralized digital democracies also fail to attract enough of a user base to create a high quality platform, which, according to the Network Effect, will reduce their ability to get more users. This compounds until the platform is an empty, failed ghost town. These platforms also fail to provide to their users the ability to leave. The solution to these problems, as you've probably guessed, is a decentralized digital democracy. Now, just saying the word "decentralized" isn't enough to do anything. Decentralization could mean a completely peer-to-peer approach, or it could mean technical federation with a model similar to Mastodon. I'm not necessarily reccomending one over the other. Either approach solves the issue of a cruel sysadmin being capable of destroying democracy. That said, any approach should attempt to maintain a cultural federation, either existing within a technical federation or outside of it. By that I mean people with similar interests, knowledge, and language should be represented as communities, rather than all being incorporated into one big election. Users will be more engaged when they have a smaller community to organize within. In addition, users will be freed to move from community to community if their community makes a decision that drives a wedge between them and the user. Lastly, users will feel comfortable within individual smaller communities before these communities gain enough scale to rival Twitter or Facebook, overcoming the ill consequences of the Network Effect. Cultural federation on a decentralized network solves the issues that past democratic social media ventures have had, and it may be the future of social media as a whole.

Sources:

Motley Fool Staff. "What is the Network Effect?" The Motley Fool The Motley Fool LLC, 2016.

SocialCoop. "Social.coop." Social.coop, 2002.

Tate, Ryan. "How You Killed Facebook Democracy: A Short History." Wired, Cande Nast Publications, 2012.