increasingly dependent upon private communications platforms, so governments’ laissez-faire approaches to speech have produced a public sphere that is increasingly governed by a small number of private corporations. Authors such as Napoli (2019b), Balkin (2018), and Langvardt (2019) have argued that this new layer in the governance structure turns traditional debates about free speech on their head, as the largest digital communication platforms now have a variety of powers over speech. These powers include the power of content moderation, the power to regulate the structure of media markets through control over the terms of content distribution, and the power to manage cultural flows by promotion or suppressing particular forms of expression.
Digital Platforms as Media Companies?
An important element of the argument against the regulation of digital platforms has been that they are not media companies. The Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has consistently argued that the social media platform is a technology company and not a media company, as it is a distributor of content that is produced and shared by others rather than a publisher or a producer of original content (Zuckerberg and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, 2018). The distinction is legally important, since the safe harbour provisions in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act 1996 and related legislation arise from a distinction between platforms and publishers that provides platforms with broad legal immunity – that is, absolves them from any responsibility for the content hosted on their sites (Gillespie, 2018a, pp. 30–40). It also reflects a conceptual distinction between twentieth-century mass media and twenty-first-century convergent social media (or Web 2.0). The former are characterized by large-scale distribution, media content of broad appeal, high barriers to entry for new content distributors, the dominance of media professionals, and a largely one-way communication flow; the latter are characterized by dramatically reduced barriers to entry, increasingly ‘niche’ media content markets, the rise of pro-am media content producers, and greater empowerment of user audiences through interactivity and two-way communications flows (Flew, 2014b; Hartley, 2012).
Both the legal and the conceptual foundations of the claim that digital platforms companies are primarily technology companies and not media companies have been challenged. A whole range of public inquiries, hearings, and reports on digital platforms and the social media have consistently argued that these companies should bear a social and moral responsibility, and possibly a legal responsibility too, for the content posted by users that is hosted on their sites. To take one example, in the United Kingdom, a report on fake news by a House of Commons committee concluded as follows:
Social media companies cannot hide behind the claim of being merely a ‘platform’ and maintain that they have no responsibility themselves in regulating the content of their sites. We … [recommend] that a new category of tech company is formulated, which tightens tech companies’ liabilities, and which is not necessarily either a ‘platform’ or a ‘publisher’. This approach would see the tech companies assume legal liability for content identified as harmful after it has been posted by users. (House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, 2019, p. 10)
Philip Napoli and Robyn Caplan have offered a detailed critique of the argument that digital platform companies are simply technology companies and not media companies (Napoli and Caplan, 2017). They observe that the definition of a media company typically associates its activities with the distribution and exhibition of media content and not simply with its production, and from this perspective companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and others are clearly moving towards the centre of the media ecosystem. In the area of news, for example, about 40 to 45% of news consumers identify online sources, including social media, as their primary news source (Newman et al., 2019). The lines between production, distribution, and exhibition are also increasingly blurred, as Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and others are subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services that commission original content – and YouTube Originals and Facebook Watch commission original content too. YouTube has evolved over time from a largely amateur-driven ‘broadcast yourself’ platform to one where multichannel networks engage content creators whose relationship to the platform is akin to that of small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) that work with a large-scale content distributor (Burgess and Green, 2018; Cunningham and Craig, 2019). Moreover, as noted above, digital platform companies routinely engage in human intervention around the promotion, downgrading, and deletion of online content on their websites – an activity analogous to the editorial function of traditional media. Finally, digital platforms compete directly with traditional media companies for advertising revenues. This puts them in ‘the business of providing content to audiences, while selling those audiences to advertisers’ – which ‘is a defining characteristic of the media sector’ (Napoli and Caplan, 2017).
In McQuail’s Media and Mass Communication Theory, McQuail and Deuze (2020) offer a series of counterpropositions to the claim that we have witnessed a transition from mass communication towards more digitally enabled interpersonal communication. They argue that digital platforms have introduced a higher degree of audience segmentation, which was enabled by predictive data analytics and behavioural assumptions based on revealed online activity, but that they do so through aggregation at scale. Digital platforms do not approach audiences as a mass, but they aggregate increasingly fine-grained individual preferences into a mass form that can – as with traditional mass media – be onsold to advertisers. What we have, then, is not the superseding of mass communication by interpersonal communication, but new ways of mixing the two forms, which are increasingly combined with human–machine communication and – as the internet of things evolves – with machine–machine communication.
The political economy of digital capitalism has thus seen the rise of global platform giants whose activities span telecommunications, information, and media and on which traditional media industries are increasingly dependent for their survival. The key to the hegemonic dominance of the platform companies is their unique access to so-called big data from multiple sources, where communication activities at scale are important generators of such data. Put differently, while online users may not experience digital platforms as mass media, they themselves are approached as masses, both by the platforms and by the third parties that use these platforms for commercial or for persuasion-related purposes (e.g. in political communication); and this remains the case even if online users are approached as segmented mass audiences – segmented, that is, along behavioural and psychographic as well as demographic categories.2
Digital Platforms and Populist Politics
For much of the time of their rise, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, the major digital platform companies dealt with a political environment that was highly favourable to their corporate interests. In many countries there was a bipartisan consensus that innovation was the key to a competitive national economy in an age of globalization and that digital platform companies were the harbingers of such innovation, so that questioning the wider contribution of digital technology and the companies that delivered it appeared quixotic and backward-looking. The zeitgeist was perhaps best captured by Tony Blair’s observation in 2007 that ‘modern politics has less to do with traditional positions of right versus left, more to do today, with what I would call the modern choice, which is open versus closed’ (Blair quoted in Goodhart, 2017, p. 3).
With the rise of populist politics, the 2010s saw a sustained challenge to bipartisan pro-corporate liberalism. The populist challenge to the laws, norms, and institutions of liberalism is apparent across a range of indicators, from the reconfiguration of European party politics3 to the rise of street movements such as the gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France. Populism was also apparent in the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, in the election of Donald Trump to US presidency, and in the election of leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Mario Salvini in Italy, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. Driven by a mix of economic (Judis, 2016; McKnight, 2018) and cultural factors (Norris and Inglehart, 2019), an overarching feature of populist politics is anti-elitism, complemented by a championing of ‘the people’ in opposition to increasingly distant and unaccountable elites (Mudde
