Abstract
The power of social network platforms to amplify the scale, speed, and significance of everyday communication is increasingly weaponized against democracy. Analyses of social networks predominantly focus on design and its effects on politics. This article shifts the debate to their business model. Built as platform businesses, social networks are privately owned public spaces with structurally limited democratic affordances. Drawing from the history, theory, and practice of land use, I develop an analogy between the financialization of land by commercial real estate development and the financialization of attention by platform businesses. Historical policies, such as incentive zoning and exclusionary zoning, shed light on how platform businesses use systems of measurement and valuation to conflate users' roles, tokenize the incentives that drive behavior, and defer the ethical responsibilities businesses have to the public. While the real estate framing reveals social networks' structural flaws and colonial roots, lessons from urban planning, community land trusts, and Indigenous land stewardship can inform their regulation and reform. Building on the broader effort to embed ethics in the development of technology, I describe possibilities to steward social networks in the public interest.
Highlights
While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear
Reclaiming social networks from financialization will require creating mechanisms that align the incentives of the platform with the public interest
Using lessons from urban planning, land justice, and Indigenous land stewardship, I propose three mechanisms to help reclaim social networks from financialization and reorient them to the public interest: (1) use urban planning to redefine roles that have been conflated by platforms, (2) use community land trusts to illustrate how public interest can be protected from market forces, and (3) use the practice of Indigenous land stewardship to inspire new thinking about the meaning of social responsibility
Summary
While in the past there may have been difficulty in identifying the most important places (in a spatial sense) for the exchange of views, today the answer is clear. The term “social network platforms” itself collapses the linguistic distance between the site of extraction (the social network) and the site of authority (the platform), thereby subsuming the platform’s business-facing dimension within discussions of public-facing social issues. The term “social media” overly focuses on the consequences of user actions such as content moderation and information integrity[11,12,13,14] and behavioral implications of interface designs such as dark patterns, persuasive design, and technological seduction[15,16,17] While these analyses are critical for understanding the symptoms and gravity of the problem, they are insufficient for exposing the mechanisms underlying the platform that are critical for their regulation and reform. The third section adapts lessons from urban planning and land justice practices to the context of social networks and proposes new possibilities for roles, incentives, and responsibilities to steward social networks in the public interest
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