The Future of Platform Power: Solving for a Moving Target

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
Faris and Joan Donovan, Nathalie Maréchal, and Dipayan Ghosh 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.