The Antidemocratic Character of Privatized Content Moderation

Political theorists and practitioners frequently portray content moderation on social media as an indispensable means to prevent harm to people and democratic societies. Recent EU regulations echo this sentiment, calling for more efficient and accountable approaches to online content moderation. Thus far theorists have primarily concentrated on issues of efficiency, transparency, accountability and the negative effects of toxic content exposure on moderators themselves. In this paper, I make diagnostic and normative claims. At the diagnostic level, I argue that we should consider the democratic costs of outsourcing the creation and enforcement of speech norms to private entities, such as social media companies and firms in the content moderation industry. Efforts to enhance privatized content moderation in the name of protecting democracy and its members from certain threats, I claim, may in fact end up undermining the anti-authoritarian character of the equal right to free speech. To this end, I first demonstrate that the equal right to free speech has such an anti-authoritarian character—it ensures that all citizens can share the responsibility for establishing speech norms in specific domains. Against this backdrop, I argue that privatized content moderation causes a shift in the responsibility for establishing shared speech-related standards, from citizens to corporations, which act as quasi-authoritarian political powers. Then, at the normative level, I discuss potential solutions to contain the antidemocratic character of privatized content moderation. In so doing, I recognize that now, it is unrealistic to imagine a digital public sphere without privatized content moderation—also considering the social costs of a totally fragmented and violent public debate. Yet, I explore the merits and challenges of several measures (such as, bottom-up monitoring of content moderation practices, democratizing the drafting of community guidelines, and raising public awareness of the technical processes behind content moderation) that could help mitigate the democratic costs associated with privatized content moderation.