Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
The great virtue of not having a political future is that leaders can actually speak their minds and say what needs to be said. Mostly, that moment comes at the end of a career, as when the celebrated World War II general turned president, Dwight Eisenhower, warned on leaving office in 1961 that the military-industrial complex was growing uncomfortably powerful for a peace-time democracy. Last week, it was Joe Biden’s turn to speak truth after power.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said last week before departing the White House. He warned of “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”
As if to prove Biden right, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, X’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook were placed more prominently in the audience at President Trump’s inauguration than his own cabinet nominees. Generously, one could read the message as a rightly proud display to the rest of the world of America’s innovative spirit and technological prowess. Less generously, the choreography is inescapably reminiscent of a Putinesque lineup of oligarchs in the Kremlin meant to show fealty as the cost of doing business.
Biden went on to say: “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers to our country as well. … Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.”
The former president is absolutely right to spell out the core threat to the body politic posed by the poison of disinformation amplified through social networks that dominate today’s communications spaces.
Absent the credibility of information, there is no solid ground for public discourse to establish consensual truths that undergird any governing consensus. When information is not trusted, narrative wars take the upper hand. Information is then filtered through pre-disposed worldviews that confirm what one already thinks. “I’ll see it when I believe it,” as the saying goes.
Instead of the information age creating a public more informed and capable of self-government than ever before, democracy is becoming so deformed by the ploys and counter-ploys of fact-challenged narratives that, in the end, either no one will believe anything or everyone will believe lies.
The Great Decentralization
It is in this context that Renee DiResta maps the evolving mediascape in Noema. She asks, “What happens when sprawling online communities fracture into politically homogenous, self-governing communities?”
For DiResta “what ultimately splintered social media wasn’t a killer app or the Federal Trade Commission — it was content moderation. Partisan users clashed with ‘referees’ tasked with defining and enforcing rules like no hate speech, or making calls about how to handle Covid-19 content. Principles like “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” — which proposed that ‘borderline’ content (posts that fell into grey areas around hate speech, for example) remain visible but unamplified — attempted to articulate a middle ground. However, even nuanced efforts were reframed as unreasonable suppression by ideologues who recognized the power of dominating online discourse. Efforts to moderate became flashpoints, fueling a feedback loop where online norms fed offline polarization — and vice versa.
And so, in successive waves, users departed for alternatives: platforms where the referees were lax (Truth Social), nearly nonexistent (Telegram) or self-appointed (Mastodon). Much of this fracturing occurred along political lines.”
This “Great Decentralization,” as DiResta calls it, is accelerating. Just last week Meta, too, announced it was ending its content moderation and turning to “community” self-policing.
Digital Federalism
As DiResta sees it, the migration away from large, centralized one-size-fits-all platforms to smaller, ideologically distinct spaces is transforming the social media space into a kind of digital federalism, “where local governance aligns with specific community norms, yet remains loosely connected to a broader whole.”
“Unlike centralized platforms, where curation and moderation are controlled from the top down, federation relies on decentralized protocols — ActivityPub for Mastodon (which Threads also supports) and the AT Protocol for Bluesky — that enable user-controlled servers and devolve moderation (and in some cases, curation) to that community level. This approach doesn’t just redefine moderation; it restructures online governance itself. And that is because, writ large, there are no refs to work.”
“Absent the credibility of information, there is no solid ground for public discourse to establish consensual truths that undergird any governing consensus.”
While centralized platforms with their centrally controlled rules and algorithms are ‘walled gardens,’” writes DiResta, federated social media might best be described as “community gardens shaped by members connected through loose social or geographical ties and a shared interest in maintaining a pleasant community space.”
The downside of digital federalism comes from precisely what it has corrected for in societies where no common narrative prevails: “Without centralized governance, there is no single authority to mediate systemic issues or consistently enforce rules,” DiResta writes.
She continues: “Beyond the challenges of addressing illegal or harmful content, the Great Decentralization raises deeper questions about social cohesion: Will the fragmentation of platforms exacerbate ideological silos and further erode the shared spaces needed for consensus and compromise?
Our communication spaces shape our norms and politics. The very tools that now directly empower users to curate their feeds and block unwanted content may also amplify divisions or reduce exposure to differing perspectives.”
Countervailing Platforms For Consensual Truth
Biden’s “tech-industrial complex” might be more accurately called “the digital media ecosystem” that includes not only the outsized power and influence of X or Meta, but also the vast constellation of self-contained virtual communities DiResta describes. It is a system that both empowers a multitude of voices as never before and concentrates control.
Since the cat of distributed social networks is out of the bag and can never revert to a time when the custodians of perception could “manufacture” consent, the effective point of challenge cannot be in the media ecosystem itself, but where information meets the political space.
What is needed is not so much “community” self-monitoring within silos, but a bridge of public deliberation across them. That bridge must entail impartial, countervailing online platforms that are commensurate with the scale of political jurisdictions. In that neutral space, competing narratives can meet each other face to face in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole to sort out the deluge of contested information and reach for consensus through negotiation and compromise.
In societies where the participatory power of social networks has outstripped the logic of delegating one’s voice to a distant stand-in, such new mediating institutions are necessary both to complement and compensate for the waning legitimacy of representative government.
As has been argued in Noema often, just as republics have historically created institutional checks and balances when too much power is concentrated in one place — as should now be the case with ownership of the means of connectivity by a handful of oligarchs, as Biden noted — so too, we need to foster checks and balances for an age when information flows are so distributed that the public sphere itself is disempowered.
