The Power of Platforms and the Power of Crowds
Series one, episode two
Hello, welcome to the second edition of The New Power Review. The review looks at new ways in which power is being created, used and governed.
In this edition: the power of platforms. Can Facebook invent its own overseer? How is the UK Government responding to online harms? Can cooperative principles be applied to platform ownership? Or could big tech’s monopolistic practices be broken in other ways?
And, the power of crowdsourcing: what happens when you open up data on Deliveroo riders’ wages? How have thousands of young women come together to throw a spotlight on rape culture in schools? How did the Ramblers mobilise thousands of volunteers to safeguard rights of way?
It’s all in this fortnight’s review.
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🔍 Facebook got so powerful that it’s trying to invent its own judiciary to govern itself — the Oversight Board is recruiting now.
You know the story. Mark Zuckerberg is bored at Harvard, invents a website to rate the attractiveness of his peers, then creates an online directory of students, adds messaging and ‘poking’, opens it to the world, adds photos, groups, events, and addictive notification signs. Fifteen years, two billion users and a valuation of $800bn later, Facebook has immense power to determine what people see online.
For years, people have asked whether such power should exist in the hands of a private corporation. Some have questions around free speech — others ask why facebook allows certain content to be seen by so many? Is Facebook merely a ‘platform’ for speech, like a paper manufacturer who has no responsibility for what the paper is used for — or is Facebook more like an editor, determining what gets seen by millions? And who decides? And what if different decisions are taken in different jurisdictions?
In an attempt to deal with some of these questions, and in the absence of any governmental effort to regulate them, Facebook has set up “Oversight Board”, a kind of worldwide supreme court of Facebook and Instagram, which is currently hiring three UK staff. Users will be able to appeal the decisions of Facebook moderators to the Oversight Board, which is made up of 40 appointees such as former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and former Danish PM Helen Thorning-Schmidt. It’s not clear who decides who is appointed to the board. The board’s decision is final and creates a precedent for moderators to follow.
Facebook is a company that sells your attention to advertisers. By pretending that it’s a utility and promoting its ‘balance of free speech and online safety’ it is presumably hoping to stave off actual regulation (such as a reversal of the laws that say that website owners aren’t responsible for the things people post there). But while millions of posts are reported by users each day, the Oversight Board has now made a grand total of seven decisions.
Meanwhile, civil society, including some of the parties that blew the whistle on the Cambridge Analytica story, has responded with the idea of a Real Facebook Oversight Board.
🏛 Perhaps we shouldn’t rely on companies to mark their own homework. After years of discussion, and lobbying from civil society, the UK Government is looking to an old power tool — regulation — to shape the platforms for better.
The government has appointed the media regulator, Ofcom, as the new regulator for ‘online harms’ and an Online Safety Bill is expected to be debated in parliament this year. It will introduce a duty of care of social media companies to their users. Ofcom will attempt to make sure the companies fulfil that duty. The regulator is currently recruiting a policy team to help do that. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport are also hiring staff (eg. policy officers) to work on online harms over the next year. The Carnegie Trust, a charity with years of experience investigating this issue produces a regular newsletter that tracks legislation and policy developments in the ‘online harms’ space.
👪 It’s a cliche to say it, but Facebook users aren’t the customers, they’re the product, whose whose attention is sold to advertisers. The users have no power over how Facebook works or runs. Is there a better way?
There might be, if it's possible to bring 150-year-old co-operative principles into the digital age.
This month, Cooperatives UK launched UnFound Accelerator, a ten-week programme for startups that “meet the needs of community; embed equity and social purpose; [with a] growth model that doesn’t involve giving up control to external profit-driven investors”. At the end of the accelerator, the projects pitch to funders. Coops UK says that a platform co-operative is a ‘democratically owned and controlled business that uses an online platform or mobile app to trade, connect people and pool resources or data.’
There are already cooperatively owned digital platforms in various fields. They include: Open Food Network, an open source platform which can be used to bring together food producers and customers; TaxiApp, a ride-hailing app owned by 1,000 black cab drivers; and Signalise, which connects BSL interpreters with those needing interpretation (and saves the NHS money along the way).
These are small organisations — why aren’t there better known platform coops? Edward Qualtrough argues that due to network effects, there’s a huge first-mover advantage for platform companies. That is, you joined Facebook because your friends invited you, and you stay there because your friends (or that person you didn’t really know at school) are there. It’s a huge coordination problem to move everyone to somewhere else. So, at the early stages of any venture-capital-backed startup, the race is simply to get as many consumers and suppliers on the platform as quickly as possible, to make it harder for anyone else to succeed. Uber, for example, spent billions on credit for new users and signing up new drivers; the only way you get access to that kind of capital is to convince investors that they’ll ultimately get their money back ten or a hundred times over. Cooperatives can’t offer that, so are not going to be able to scale the same way.
Leila O’Sullivan at Coops UK remains optimistic. She said:
‘A large part of the finance raised by traditional companies is used for user acquisition, via marketing campaigns, buying up competitors, or lobbying government to remove obstacles. Platform co-ops will still need finance to increase their users, but will use different and less expensive forms of acquisition, including building on the solidarity of the co-operative movement… This is slower, but is more sustainable in the long term.”
Ready to take on big tech with a coop? Register for the introductory Zoom webinar on 1 April, and apply before 11 April. The team hope to run accelerators twice a year for the next few years.
📦 Another aspect of the problem is that once platforms have got the users, they can throw up walls to lock users in, preventing sharing or moving across platforms. So one route to breaking this monopoly might be to empower users to move their data, or at least be able to collaborate across platforms.
It’s not so unusual for governments to break up private monopolies in order to serve the public good. And it might seem more urgent if such a monopoly — Facebook for example — owns what has become important, ubiquitous social infrastructure. But if — like Facebook — that monopoly operates across many countries, individual states may struggle to respond, in the absence of a stronger global governance regime.
So an additional option, inspired by the open source movement, is to limit the power of big tech by moving towards ‘interoperability’. The idea here is that different platforms should be forced to connect to each other using open protocols, so a user can move seamlessly from one to the other, or communicate freely across them. A good example where this is already in place is email. The owner of a Gmail account can communicate with the owner of an Outlook account, despite them being owned by different companies. Open protocols might mean you could message someone on Snapchat via Facebook. Or you could create events on Facebook, but invite people without Facebook accounts. Network effects create monopolies — you stay where everyone is for convenience — but by making them interoperable, it would be easier for people to move between platforms while still remaining in touch. Introducing interoperability could help break the platform's current monopolies and introduce a race-to-the-top to meet user needs, rather than advertiser needs. For a more detailed explanation of this idea, check out Ira Bolychevsky’s article, “Instead of breaking Big Tech up, let's break them open”.
Platforms provide the opportunity to organise, to create new power swiftly and lightly, to crowd-in people who care. The following examples illustrate this, from organising to try to open up data previously only seen by platforms, or making use of existing platforms like Instagram, or the creation of new digital tools to allow crowds to act.
🥡 Efforts to crowdsource data on Deliveroo riders’ wages reached only a small number of riders, but the effect of social pressure on the treatment of workers in the gig economy appears to have limited the company’s flotation value.
The previous edition of The New Power Review covered IWGB/Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s effort to crowdsource data on Deliveroo riders’ wages — previously only accessible by Deliveroo themselves. The results are in, the data is published, and the headline is that many riders are making less than the minimum wage, sometimes as little as £2/hr. The crowdsourced sample involved only 300 riders (of perhaps 50,000 riders total), so it’s hard to draw robust conclusions. Deliveroo, of course, claim that it’s nonsense, but they will only say that their riders earn on average ‘£13/hr at the busiest time’, which is about as helpful as the crowdsourced data.
Nonetheless, the additional focus on workers’ rights — alongside the IWGB’s victory in a unanimous UK Supreme Court ruling against Uber — has spooked the more socially conscious investors, who would have been expected to buy into Deliveroo’s public share offer. Aviva, which controls £365bn in assets, is among funds that didn’t invest in Deliveroo’s flotation. Even without any ‘social conscience’, the most profit-maximising fund will recognise that the work of folks like IWGB could lead to new regulation, which creates a risk for Deliveroo’s business model.
In related news from the USA: a vote this week in Alabama could establish the first unionised Amazon warehouse in the US. This half-serious tweet shows how simply social media virality can be harnessed to draw attention to an issue — a form of power recognised by Amazon, who are alleged to have created fake worker accounts to tweet anti-union messages.
🙅Young women are organising online to publish thousands of testimonials of rape culture, leading to calls for inquiries.
In 2016, Heather O’Donnell organised a letter to Dulwich College’s headmaster. The letter was signed by 150 people and warned of a misogynistic culture at the college. She did not receive a reply.
Over four years later, Soma Sara shared her story of ‘rape culture’ on Instagram. Within a week she’d received and anonymously shared over 300 related stories from others. She then set up a website to which people could make anonymous submissions, which has now received 8,000 accounts, making the scale of rape culture impossible to deny.
The project has resulted in school walkouts, front-page news across all major newspapers, responses from senior police officers and calls for an independent inquiry from politicians.
🔬In one year, four million people have volunteered data on their health status to help identify new Covid symptoms.
Last March, the company behind a health reporting app, designed to to track users’ response to the food they were eating, pivoted to track Covid symptoms. Since then, over four million people in the UK have volunteered data about their health, with an average of one million weekly users.
Co-founder Jonathan Wolf said:
‘[We realised that] if you could get a large number of people to collect symptom data at home and use machine-learning, you could really understand things that’s nobody’s been able to do before.’
As one volunteer said:
‘Had everyone been using it, we would have cracked this thing by now.’
The vast collective data effort has allowed the identification of new symptoms and the prediction of geographical hotspots.
Communication from the company is careful to attribute the project’s success to its users, and the app keeps users updated on discoveries that have been made using the data, but the data itself is closed to any kind of open analysis. In future, maybe there’s room for this kind of donated health data to be open to citizen science efforts.
🗺 Lastly — the Ramblers has galvanised thousands of people to crowdsource details of rights of way to stop such routes being lost. Sophie Yeo’s Inkcap newsletter highlights their impressive crowdsourced effort.
The ‘Don’t Lose Your Way’ campaign mobilised thousands of online volunteers to compare old maps with new to identify ‘lost footpaths’. These footpaths could be lost forever unless their existence is proved to the authorities over the next few years. The Ramblers say the effort has identified ‘over 49,000 miles of potential lost rights of way’. Keep walking.
Thanks for reading. In response to the first edition, Steve S. emailed to suggest that:
‘The area of study of “new power” should be on what new or innovative ways of expressing the capacity to bring about outcomes in society can be identified, both for individuals and groups.’
Does that sound right? Let us know what you think.
More in a fortnight.