Artificial Intelligence (Governance), Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes, Great Power Relations
Facebook/Meta, YouTube/Google, and other platforms make incredibly impactful decisions about the communications of billions. Better choices can significantly impact geopolitics, pandemic response, the incentives on politicians and journalists, etc. Right now, those decisions are primarily in the hands of corporate CEO’s—and heavily influenced by pressure from partisan and authoritarian governments aiming to entrench their own power. There is an alternative:platform democracy. In the past decade, a new suite of democratic processes have been shown to be surprisingly effective at navigating challenging and controversial issues, from nuclear power policy in South Korea to abortion in Ireland.
Such processes have been tested around the world, overcome the pitfalls of elections and referendums, and can work at platform scale. They enable the creation of independent ‘people’s mandates’ for platform policies—something invaluable for the impacted populations, well-meaning governments which are unable to act on speech, and even the platforms themselves (in many cases at least, they don’t want to decide things since it opens them up to more government retaliation). We have a rapidly closing policy window to test and deploy platform democracy and give it real power and teeth. We’d like to see new organizations to advocate for, test, measure, certify, and scale platform democracy processes. We are especially excited about exploring the ways that these approaches can be used beyond just platform policies, but also for governance of the AI systems created and deployed by powerful corporations.
(Note: This is not as crazy as it sounds; several platforms you have heard are dedicating significant resources to actively explore this, but they need neutral 3rd party orgs to work with; relevant non-profits are very interested but are stretched too thin to do much. The primary approaches I am referring to here are mini-publics and systems like Polis.)
Platform Democracy Institutions
Artificial Intelligence (Governance), Epistemic Institutions, Values and Reflective Processes, Great Power Relations
Facebook/Meta, YouTube/Google, and other platforms make incredibly impactful decisions about the communications of billions. Better choices can significantly impact geopolitics, pandemic response, the incentives on politicians and journalists, etc. Right now, those decisions are primarily in the hands of corporate CEO’s—and heavily influenced by pressure from partisan and authoritarian governments aiming to entrench their own power. There is an alternative: platform democracy. In the past decade, a new suite of democratic processes have been shown to be surprisingly effective at navigating challenging and controversial issues, from nuclear power policy in South Korea to abortion in Ireland.
Such processes have been tested around the world, overcome the pitfalls of elections and referendums, and can work at platform scale. They enable the creation of independent ‘people’s mandates’ for platform policies—something invaluable for the impacted populations, well-meaning governments which are unable to act on speech, and even the platforms themselves (in many cases at least, they don’t want to decide things since it opens them up to more government retaliation). We have a rapidly closing policy window to test and deploy platform democracy and give it real power and teeth. We’d like to see new organizations to advocate for, test, measure, certify, and scale platform democracy processes. We are especially excited about exploring the ways that these approaches can be used beyond just platform policies, but also for governance of the AI systems created and deployed by powerful corporations.
(Note: This is not as crazy as it sounds; several platforms you have heard are dedicating significant resources to actively explore this, but they need neutral 3rd party orgs to work with; relevant non-profits are very interested but are stretched too thin to do much. The primary approaches I am referring to here are mini-publics and systems like Polis.)
More detail at platformdemocracy.com (not an org; just a working paper right now)