The second, and not necessarily mutually exclusive, approach is to pursue
policies aimed at increasing the degree of competition among internet platforms.
As we have seen, liberal democracies have pursued a variety of mechanisms to
support competition and pluralism, albeit with mixed degrees of success and
based on different conceptions of pluralism and the role of the state. There is
growing interest and focus on the competitive practices of large internet
companies, but it is not immediately obvious how and whether alternative
internet media platforms would affect the quality of civic discourse online and
the incidence of disinformation (Cremer, de Montjoye, and Schweitzer 2019).

There is a growing consensus that antitrust law needs to be broken out of the
framework established by the Chicago School back in the 1980s and
modernized to meet the needs of the digital age. There are several prongs to

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108890960 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Social_Media_and_Democracy