Power, property and democracy in social media platforms

Digital social media platforms create new spheres of social action which involve new forms and constellations of power. These forms of power, and the extent to which they are distinct from our established understandings of power, remain under-conceptualised. In the absence of an adequate understanding of the forms and constellations of power, we are also unable to imagine what it would take to democratize the social relations that social media platforms constitute. This paper posits that the forms and constellations of power that social media platforms give rise to are a function of the assignment of property rights as regards of the data, the infrastructure, and the algorithms that are used to interact on these platforms. On this premise, it elaborates three ideal-typical conceptions of social media platforms in terms of ‘market goods’, ‘decentralized common goods’, and ‘centralized public goods’. Each of these conceptions comes with its own understandings of the appropriate assignment of property rights in infrastructure, data and algorithms, the rules of exchange, and the primary values to be served. Comparing the three conceptions helps to identify their respective merits, the different forms of power at play, as well as the forms of (collective) action that are conceivable to move from one constellation to another.