It’s Time to Start Treating Social Platforms Like Governments
Thought experiment. What if there was a company that owned a town. What if they owned the homes and the streets and the schools and the fire department? What if two and a half billion people moved into those homes, lived their lives, and built their businesses?
I spent my youth reading books in which corporations became governments, it’s an old idea in science fiction. But then, a couple years ago, I looked up and realized that we were (or at least I was) already there.
We are the first people to have dual citizenship in a democratic state and a corporate state. No one ever thought that the users of a social media platform were customers, that’s why they called us “users.” But turn your head to the side, and things clear up. We’re not their customers, we’re their citizens.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other economic and social platforms are not trying to build businesses, they are trying to build countries. Countries with laws, law enforcement, borders, and economic policy. YouTube has an intelligence team that seeks out and eliminates misinformation. Facebook is building an independent oversight board to establish content moderation precedents, a move many compared to the creation of a “Supreme Court.” Platforms, from Amazon to TikTok, now provide ways for their citizens to build businesses on their land, and all of them take a tax on that income.
I make my living (and the living of my 40+ employees) uploading videos to YouTube. So I am even more aware of the structure of this relationship. YouTube takes 45% of the revenue I earn to pay for its infrastructure. And when something breaks, it is not dissimilar to a failure of physical infrastructure in a city.
For YouTube creators, “copyright” is not a legal structure, it is a YouTube policy. Copyright law does not matter, because YouTube has reached agreements with major media companies, allowing the use of a huge amount of copyrighted material, as long as 100% of the money made goes to the media company and not to the creator. I don’t think that’s in the constitution.
Neither do I own much of the property that feels as if it is mine. In our hearts, we imagine that our TikTok profiles and Facebook pages are ours, little homes built in a big city that is governed by the platform. And we feel like we have a right to the space we occupy. That is not the case. We may own some of the things inside that space, but these homes are on borrowed land.
And this isn’t just the situation for people who have built their businesses on these platforms. These platforms are, by their nature and their names, social. Their decisions have real impacts on our lives and our societies. We cannot just leave, these places are in many ways extensions of our homes. They feel like a place we live because they are a place we live.
The problem here isn’t so much that these platforms have violated our trust by pretending to be something they’re not, it’s more that we don’t have a category for what they actually are. And it may yet be that they don’t have to be our governments. Maybe there will be more options. Maybe network effects aren’t as important as they seem. Maybe anti-trust regulation will prevent them from acquiring or destroying every upstart that provides viable alternatives.
Maybe there is still time to go back. But, in this moment, we are where we are. And we are living a good part of our lives in places with unelected leaders who have no term limits. It’s a world where a tiny number of people are in charge of the most powerful institutions imaginable. These companies don’t just manufacture metal or petroleum like the magnates of old. They manufacture our lives. They build societies.
I’m not saying that these are the wrong people to have this much power, I’m saying that no one should. And so we must look to the ways we can check that power.
We do not get a vote, that’s for certain. But there are ways.
Government Regulation
Legally, these organizations still exist inside countries. That means that, at least for now, the government can regulate them. So traditional democracy can eventually reach them, if and when it is working.
Creator Pressure
All of these platforms rely on their citizens to exist, and people can leave at any time. That is extra true for platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok, where relatively small groups of popular creators leaving could cause lasting damage.
That power should be wielded, and users of those platforms should organize to put pressure on these corporate governments not just to help get better tools for creators, but also to make a more perfect platform. This is a tactic that YouTube has responded to, changing policies in response to concerns about hate speech or abuse on the platform. That should be done in concert with the press and journalists who have the skills and credibility to bring problems to light.
Employee Pressure
Likewise, those inside these companies should organize. Hiring and retaining talent in the tech industry is expensive and vital. Those people have real power over their bosses, especially because it is often fairly easy for them to find work elsewhere, and employee walkouts are terrible PR for these leaders who are often obsessed with their public image.
Advertiser Pressure
Finally, we see other companies providing pressure. Whether it’s performative or not, advertiser boycotts have caused real change, first with YouTube’s “Adpocalypse” and now with Facebook’s growing ad boycott. These systems are especially effective because of how deeply dependent on advertising these platforms are. Though, Facebook, with over 8 million individual advertisers, is proving resilient.
We’ve seen all of these systems accomplish some change. There are ways to exert some small amounts of influence on the leaders of our new governments. As long as they have this amount of power (or, as I think is likely, even more power) we’re going to be living in a world where we are no longer customers, we are citizens. And we will have to start acting like it, even if it is not the world any of us wanted or expected.
Hank Green is the author of the new book “A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor” the conclusion to the story begun in “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing.” He is the CEO of Complexly, an educational media company. You can catch him at his newsletter “Pay Attention” on Substack.
