2017; Wachter, Mittelstadt, and Russell 2018). Social media platforms
present a similar challenge; companies like Facebook and Google have
shown themselves to be highly important venues for political speech and
deliberation around the world, and their increasing role as a global channel
for news and political information means that they are now clearly institutions
with signiﬁcant democratic implications (Garton Ash 2016; Gorwa 2019a;
Van Dijck, Poell, and Waal 2018). Their apparent inﬂuence, combined with
many high-proﬁle scandals, suggests that these ﬁrms can pose a threat to the
average citizen’s best interests. Today, platform companies clearly meet the
threshold articulated in traditional theories of democratic transparency for the
types of actors that should require transparency, oversight, regulation, and
accountability.
Social_Media_and_Democracy