Technology

This is how I see it: Facebook is essentially a government. (Replace Facebook with any other social media platform that's too big to compete with). It's where the people are, and like it or not, you have to be on Facebook to reach the masses.

I've never used Facebook in any real capacity, and at times it was to my detriment. At University, Facebook groups were (are?) how students communicate with each other, share information and knowledge, ask for help, etc. By not being on Facebook I missed out on all of that stuff. It's futile to try to get everyone else to move elsewhere - it just ain't happening.

So Facebook is a de-facto government: people HAVE to be on Facebook, and the company has the exclusive ability to police the platform and control how it can be used - e.g. through APIs and the website interface. Everyone else is at the whims of that.

But as a government, Facebook is obviously not a democracy. It's a dictatorship. Maybe an oligarchy. Look I know very little about political systems, but we can all probably agree that it's as far from a democracy as can be.

It is my opinion that governments need to wise up to this. Tech platforms that become nearly as powerful as governments are a direct threat to democracy when they don't have any of the checks and balances that democracies have. Not to mention when the governments themselves begin to rely on these platforms to publish announcements and stuff. The EU's Digital Markets Act is a big step in the right direction. I hope it's just the start.