Читать книгу Regulating Platforms - Terry Flew - Страница 25

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 and Kaltwasser, 2017).

In populist policies, what constitutes an ‘elite’ is an endless source of contention and contestation. Left-wing politicians such as Bernie Sanders in the United States or Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom were vocal opponents of bankers, financiers, big business, and ‘centrists’ in their own political parties who supported such interests. Elites, or ‘the establishment’, are, by this reckoning, broadly synonymous with what Marxists would identify as the ruling class. For those on the political right who adopt a nationalist viewpoint, capitalists are part of the elite, but primarily by reason of championing a ‘globalist’ perspective rather than by virtue of being themselves wealthy. (Many populists, such as Donald Trump, are themselves very wealthy.) From this perspective, elites tend to be identified with figures such as judges, intellectuals, celebrities, politicians, and others whom the political right views as usurpers of the popular will, particularly if they champion globalization and what the political right considers ‘cosmopolitan’ perspectives. Racism can and frequently does play a part in this, but it intersects with a wider mistrust of political elites, anger about corruption, and the perception of being excluded from the institutions of liberal democracy and from the benefits of the global market economy – attitudes that would be shared by many left-wing populists (Flew, 2018a; Flew and Iosifidis, 2020; Mouffe, 2018).

Debates on populism and digital platforms have tended to revolve around whether the social media have been catalysts for populist movements and, if so, whether that is something to be concerned about. The creation of ‘networked publics’ that social media platforms have been associated with (boyd, 2010; Howard and Hussain, 2013; Papacharissi, 2015), and the correlation between this phenomenon and the ongoing shrinkage of traditional news media outlets and professional journalism, have triggered debates on a post-truth politics (Waisbord, 2018a), the proliferation of fake news (Flew, 2019), and the balkanization of rival political and ideological perspectives within the filter bubbles that arise from the algorithmic sorting of news (Napoli, 2019b). There is also debate on the ethics of accepting, on digital platforms, political advertising that unfairly maligns opponents through manipulated words and images. Another subject of discussion is whether platforms have become the ideal conduits for large-scale political propaganda campaigns (Raicu, 2019; Young and McGregor, 2020).

But there is also the problem that owners and managers of digital platforms themselves constitute an elite, and the politics of populism is increasingly inserted into debates around platform regulation. Populist challenges to digital platforms have been coming from the political right, centre, and left. Conservatives have complained that Silicon Valley is a bastion of West Coast liberalism and a ‘one-party state’, in the words of tech entrepreneur and one-time Trump supporter Peter Theil (Solon, 2018). In the US Congress in 2017, the California Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, warned tech companies ‘I don’t think you get it. … You created these platforms, and they are being misused. And you have to be the ones to do something about it – or we will’, while the North Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, observed: ‘continued self-regulation is not the right answer when it comes to dealing with the abuses we have seen on Facebook’ (both quoted in Flew et al., 2019, p. 34). On the global stage, President Emmanuel Macron of France called for greater regulation of digital platforms as a ‘third way’ between the Californian ideology and authoritarian statism (Macron, 2018).

The major populist challenge to digital platforms came from the political left, in the form of a renewal of the antitrust movement. Lina Khan pointed to the unfettered expansion of Amazon as the dominant player in electronic commerce: this dominance is achieved through a business model that pursues data-driven integration across business segments that competitors are unable to replicate, and the goal is for Amazon to acquire monopoly power in platform markets without triggering competition policy concerns, as it does not impose higher prices for consumers (Khan, 2018a). Tim Wu argued that major mergers and acquisitions such as Facebook’s takeover of Instagram and WhatsApp or Google’s acquisition of the online mapping company Waze, as well as the creation of ‘clone’ digital products, undermine potential competitors, making the case for the renewal of antitrust law in an age of digital platforms and multisided markets (Wu, 2018). This ‘neo-Brandeisian moment’ in public policy debates (Shapiro, 2018; Wu, 2018) found a strong political voice during Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination, as Warren made breaking up the big tech companies a core item on her agenda (Warren, 2019). The Biden administration, which came to power in the United States in 2021, has appointed Khan to the Federal Trade Commission and Wu to the National Economic Council, indicating that these arguments will have some influence within that administration.