What Can and Should Platforms Be Held Responsible For?

Media systems are embedded in democracy and thus implicated in the current decline of democracy

In the interdisciplinary field of misinformation and disinformation studies, there has been no consistent answer to the question of ‘what can and should platforms be responsible for in the context of democratic decay’ (i.e., a context in which democratic institutions, structures, norms, and governance are eroding)? In this paper, Kreiss and Barrett take up this question in light of several relevant literatures on democracies in transition towards more authoritarian or ‘hybrid’ regimes, or more broadly, literatures examining the deterioration of core democratic processes, institutions, and governance mechanisms.

Our review of this literature reveals that we lack good theoretical and empirical understandings of media systems in relation to democratic decay, especially the roles played by platforms. To address this, the authors conceptually outline several indirect effects of platforms on democratic decay, focusing on their roles in shaping public opinion and political institutions. In doing so they bring two academic literatures together: 1) work on democratic decay that often fails to consider media and platforms, and 2) work on platforms that often focuses narrowly on public opinion and attitudes, overlooking institutional democratic processes