The Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale’s central proposal was to outsource the moderation of political content from the big platforms—Twitter, Facebook, and Google—to a layer of competitive middleware companies as a means of reducing these platforms’ power over political speech. In this exchange on platform power, Robert Fares and Joan Donovan, Nathalie Marshal and Dayan, Gosh and Ramesh Srinivasan all argue in different ways that middleware would not stem the flow of toxic content, and in certain ways might actually intensify it. What three of our critics do not take into account is the illegitimacy of using either public or private power to suppress this hazard. Our working group’s promotion of middleware rests on a normative view about the continuing importance of freedom of speech. Middleware is the most politically realistic way forward.
This essay is a part of an exchange based on Francis Fukuyama’s “Making the Internet Safe for Democracy” from the April 2021 issue of the Journal of Democracy.
I am very grateful to the Journal of Democracy for hosting this exchange on my April 2021 article “Making the Internet Safe for Democracy,” which summarized the work of the Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale. The comments and criticisms are uniformly thoughtful, and many echo the concerns that motivated our group at the outset.
Our working group is continuing to develop the idea put forth in the article about “middleware” as a solution to excessively concentrated platform power. We hope to have a prototype of a middleware application ready for a public demonstration by the end of the year. Since my previous article was written, our thinking has evolved somewhat regarding both the nature of the problem and potential solutions. I realize that this makes our proposal something of a moving target, but the problem itself has evolved rapidly.
As noted earlier, our thinking has evolved a bit since the original article. In our white paper, we were agnostic as to how deeply middleware would penetrate into the platform APIs (application-programming interfaces). At one extreme, one could imagine middleware taking over the entire user interface from Facebook and Google, and presenting data from these platforms in a completely different way. A much milder version of middleware would function as an add-on to the content served up by the platforms. It might look similar to the content labels that Twitter has begun to implement, or resemble the service offered by the startup News guard, a browser plug-in that provides credibility rankings for different news sources.
We have come to the view that only the lighter version of middleware will be politically feasible. The big platforms already do a great deal of very time-consuming and difficult moderation of nonpolitical content, filtering out photography, graphic violence, criminal incitement, and the like. This type of content moderation is complex and costly, and needs to remain the responsibility of the well-resourced platforms. Middleware would necessarily have to ride on top of nonpolitical content moderation. (Where the dividing line is between political and nonpolitical is today a fraught question, of course, given the politicization of everything from sports to mask-wearing, and this is an issue that middleware implementations would have to deal with in the future.)
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