Governance by history

Workplace surveillance

Platform Dependency

8 September 2026 - Platform Dependence in Public Communication - Ceren and Rodrique (work in progress)

I.                PLATFORM DEPENDENCE IN PUBLIC COMMUNICATION – WHAT IS IT , WHO IS AFFECTED BY IT AND WHY IT MATTERS LEGALLY AND INSTITUTIONALLY – C

A.           Public communication is the conveyance of a message to a large group of people. This includes public announcements, advertisements in public spaces, social media broadcasts, news delivered in reporting, editorials, opinion pieces, and even political campaigns. Platform dependence is the reliance on a third party platform or digital infrastructure to reach the audience of the public communication, the public. Platform dependence in public communication therefore includes reliance on private companies like Meta (Facebook), state television channels, or telecommunications providers who provide and control access to, and develop the infrastructure of such platforms. For the purpose of this exercise, news will be utilized as the main example of public communication.

B.          Those who are affected by platform dependence in public communication are the communicators and the public alike. News outlets are mainly for-profit organizations. These organizations’ reliance on third party digital platforms grows day-by-day to maintain their popularity and engagement (such as on social media platforms) ultimately deciding the revenue generated from advertisers. The public on the other hand are provided catchier and more diluted information, gaining just enough knowledge to grab their attention while not being provided substantial knowledge on matters. Additionally,i members of the public who do not have the resources to access such platforms and digital services remain “information poor”. Digital rich, the virtual class of tech-professional and entrepreneurs benefit from the dependence to their platforms.

C.            This is crucial as platform dependence may threaten democracy and free political expression. Platforms, run by private parties, can be run according to their political beliefs. Social media platforms aiming to keep users online utilize algorithms that provide their users with their confirmed preferences, not allowing the conveyance of a truly heteregenious catalogue of news. The original ideal of the democratic electronic agora is undermined when private corporations control the flow of news and the infrastructure on which they are provided.

II.              HISTORICAL LINEAGE – HISTORICAL MOMENTS/DECISIONS/INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS - R

It is very difficult to discuss news without highlighting the deep entanglement it shares with with information. For our purpose 'information' will have the the following characteristics; it can be learned, processed, archived, and it's worth correlates to its rarity.

[1 ]

News is the end result of the process of taking this information from one form to another, and transmitting to a wider, typically public audience is what we will anchor our definition of 'news' to be. There is and has always been an obvious tension between the rarity that gives information its worth and the act of transmission that makes it less rare. Modern form of this can be traced to Renaissance Europe,

[2 ]

where a single innovation not only leaned on but also displaced established pattern of trusted networks collecting, processing and sharing news by way of the church, merchants, students, diplomats and so on.

[3 ]

This innovation is the invention of printing in the 15th century. It had consequences beyond those imagined by its inventor, as it offered new possibilities for the dissemination of news. It must be reiterated that printing benefitted from the existing networks and not the other way around. This is evident by Johann Carolus'  Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien handwritten weekly newspaper for an elite audience fruitfully running prior to the advent of printing. However, the printing press coupled with existing network and infrastructure of the postal system brought industrialisation and scale unknown to the trade and the world at the time. One of the first paying customer for press was the Church, selling indulgences. Beniger's stands: control depends on information processing and communication working together, and the this innovation at that current point time supplied both at once.

[4 ]

Nonetheless, a strong parallel between the press and later computing revolutions it's stated relationship with state.

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With the former seeming to lean more towards the state and the other in the opposite direction.

The next pivotal historical point which disturbs the way in which news is transmitted is by way of the radio. The radio is huge leap frog as it permitted the decoupling of reach from cost, reliance on aging network such as the postal system. Where the method of control under print was through the content printed, the radio moved closer to physics on licensing broadcast rights. This changed the trajectory of new's as it birth the state owned monopoly broadcaster, responsible for broadcasting news to anyone with a receiver on the other end within appropriate frequency. News outlet now had more than one method for distributing news and for the first time had a way of engaging in dialogue on the news of the day as it makes it way via print and sound-wave. Diversity of dependency is an important aspect of this stage in history.

III.             MECHANISM OF PATH DEPENDENCE - C

A.            The public is generally partaking in consuming content on social media. Hence, with its 3 billion monthly active users for example, Instagram has an installed base for news outlets to depend upon (Instagram Revenue and Usage Statistics (2026), n.d.). The audiences of news outlets spend an increasing amount of their time on social media platforms, which gives results in a habitual entrenchment for these news outlets: the means of reaching the audience is dependent on their habits of content consumption. An indirect contractual entrenchment may also be discussed, as news outlets have obligations to their advertisers (who may request the upkeep of views/clicks on the news platforms they pay to advertise in). Cultural entrenchment should not be disregarded: the public expects to receive their news on social media platforms they readily frequent, and many news outlets meet this expectation. Hence, news outlets must partake in building a presence in social media platforms if they wish to compete.

IV.            POLITICS AND DISTRIBUTION – WHOSE INTERESTS ARE STRENGTHENED AND WHO HAS FEWER CHOICES - C

A.            Barbook argues that although the California Ideology claims that state power will be decreased and individuals will be empowered through decentralized networks enabled by digital technologies, he demonstrates that public communication is in fact not immune to undemocratic powers. These include private corporations: these corporations may gatekeep in choosing when and how to provide access to their platforms, while finetuning how users navigate their platforms.

By enabling access to content that users tend to agree with, those who manage these platforms enable public opinion to shift to extremes. Being “fed” the same narrative and not being challenged to see an opposing perspective ultimately provides fewer choices to the consumer of the information, the general public. Therefore, individual agency is constrained by platform architecture and control, not liberated by it.

V.              AT WHAT POINT IN HISTORY WAS A DIFFERENT TRAJECTORY POSSIBLE? - R

A.            News not subscribing to / presenting news on social media as platform (?)

VI.            GOVERNANCE IMPLICATION – ONE PROPOSITION FOR CURRENT DAY GOVERNANCE - R

OPEN PLATFORMS (ALTERNATIVE FACEBOOK A)

<section class="footnotes">

1. Mark Greengrass, Thierry Rentet and Stéphane Gal, ‘The Hinterland of the Newsletter: Handling Information in Space and Time’ in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Brill 2016)
   http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w8h1ng.34accessed 7 September 2026; ‘Michel Serres Prononce En Sorbonne La Conférence Inaugurale Du Programme Paris Nouveaux Mondes - La Chancellerie Des Universités de Paris’ (La Chancellerie des Universités de Paris, 1 January 2013)
   https://www.sorbonne.fr/michel-serres-prononce-en-sorbonne-la-conference-inaugurale-du-programme-paris-nouveaux-mondes/accessed 7 September 2026. James Ralph Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard Univ Press 1986).
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2. Brendan Dooley, Making News in Renaissance Europe (1st edn, Cambridge University Press 2026)
   https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009358835.
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3. Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself (Yale University Press 2014). Helmer Helmers, ‘Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe: Towards a New History of News’ (2016) 22 Media History 401
   https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2016.1174570.
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4. James Ralph Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard Univ Press 1986) P24-25
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5. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology (1996)
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