Collective Accountability in Digital Spaces

Note: I recently started writing a newsletter about the intersection of technology and governance,Hello, Governor! I’m still experimenting with format, content, etc, so feel free to give feedback about what you like or what you’d want to see.

It can be a struggle to hold groups accountable for misbehavior, even when the group is structured through legal forms, with public membership and clear leadership. On social media platforms populated by anonymous accounts, with membership and leadership often informal and invisible, accountability feels like a pipe dream.

And yet we urgently need accountability - for misinformation, for harassment, for exploitation, and for so much more. There is a deep anger towards social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, both for their negligence in allowing these problems to spread, but also because expressing anger towards them is our only mechanism for regulating online behavior. Lacking other options, we resort to demanding that specific users be banned and specific behavior suppressed.

Platforms protest - rightly, I believe - that they shouldn’t be in control of public debate. But this is also an evasion of responsibility. Companies could design mechanisms of accountability into their platforms, allowing users themselves to collectively control debate, but they have chosen not to. I suspect that, for all their rhetoric about empowering users, they are afraid to let users control what they see. What if they made decisions that hurt the company’s bottom line?

Whatever their reasons, the failure of social tech companies to design accountability into their platforms has created this crisis. To understand what they might do differently, we can look at two long-established websites that offer us a glimpse of what’s possible.

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