Platform Dependence in Public Communication (News) - Ceren Isiklar & Rodrigue Kayembe

From Technology Governance Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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. 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.

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 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, members of the public who do not have the resources to access such platforms and digital services remain “information poor”. 6 Digital rich, the virtual class of tech-professional and entrepreneurs benefit from the dependence to their platforms.

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 heterogeneous 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.

Historical Lineage

Modern form of this can be traced to Renaissance Europe,[2] where a single innovation displaced established networks of collecting, processing and sharing news.The church, merchants, students, and diplomats were core participants in this ecosystem.[3] The invention of printing in the 15th century was a seismic point in history as it offered new possibilities for the dissemination of information and therefore news. Initially, printing benefitted from the existing networks more than the networks benefitted from printing. This was the case until the networks were transformed in an unrecognisable manner (a trend we will see come to see throughout the history of the news. A clear instance of this is Johann Carolus's Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, a handwritten newspaper delivered weekly to the elite class of the time. The mode of production and the means of distribution were constrained by the available technology rather than strategy. The mode of production decreased the cost, time and later revolutionised the network as production could be localised and dependency on transporting was reduced. 


One of the first paying customers for press was the Church, selling indulgences. During this era the Church and the State were in a clear symbiotic relationship, and drawing a separation between the two was difficult. Both actors deeply understood Beniger's principle that control depends on information processing and communication working together.[4]  By introducing hurdles (such as the requirement of licensing the type of content that could be printed) and benefiting from the industrial might of this innovation, the Church and the state had effectively consolidated power and control. Interestingly, this contrasts what would take place generations later in the computing revolutions, where proximity to the state purposely unmentioned in order to appeal to the masses.[5]


The next evolution of news took place when transmission was once again innovated with the radio. Radio’s reach could be decoupled from the cost, decreasing reliance on aging networks such as the now matured postal system. Control could be focused on content providers  and who would be allowed broadcast rights. This changed the trajectory of news as a broadcaster could deliver news to anyone with a receiver dialed in to the relevant frequency. News outlets now had legitimate, diverse, alternative methods of production and distribution. The television followed not after, however it mostly followed the trajectory of the radio with the caveat that it dominated due to ability to generate commercial revenue through advertisement and optionality it provided.  

Mechanism of Path Dependence

The public generally partakes in the consumption of 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 audience of news outlets spends an increasing amount of their time on social media platforms, which results in a habitual entrenchment for these news outlets. In other words, the means of reaching the audience is dependent on the audience’s habits of content consumption. An indirect contractual entrenchment may also be speculated, 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.

Politics and Distribution 

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.

Point Of No Return

In examining the lineage of news and its eventual platform dependency, the diminishing returns of technological advancement for the industry become evident. Revenue has not been a particular focus of this article. The broadcast era was the era in which news outlets earned some of their largest revenues and were at their most independent. It was during this time that news outlets initiated the unbundling of one of their main revenue generators, the classified advertisement. By initiating this unbundling without any afterthought on capitalising on its timely advantages, news outlets entered their relationships with social media platforms in a weakened position. Searching for a saviour and giving the platform the credentials and reputation they needed in the early days in return. Reminiscent of the trend identified earlier. An example of a new's outlet that has navigated this journey with more diligence is The New York Times.

Governance Implication & Proposition

It's clear that complete avoidance of these platforms on the part of news outlet is a Herculean request! New's outlets have flocked to these platforms due to their substantial audience and lock on audience. It's virtually impossible for a single organisation to mount a significant rebellion without self harming. A proposal is to approach the problem more as a herd and invest and cultivate more alternative open platforms for example Bluesky  and Mastadon. The benefit that these platforms bring about begin with not only optionality from the current dependencies but governance via protocol.

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.34 accessed 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).
  2. Brendan Dooley, Making News in Renaissance Europe (1st edn, Cambridge University Press 2026) https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009358835.
  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.
  4. James Ralph Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard Univ Press 1986) P24-25
  5. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology (1996)
  6. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology (1996)
Retrieved from "https://wiki.ivir.nl/index.php?title=Platform_Dependence_in_Public_Communication_(News)_-_Ceren_Isiklar_%26_Rodrigue_Kayembe&oldid=123833"