As part of Options for the UK – Nesta’s new home for ideas and radical thinking on policy challenges – Tony Curzon Price argues that our current regulatory approach to regulating social media is broken.
Attempting to tweak the incentives of platforms that profit through the status quo is insufficient to stem the profound externalities that marketised platforms produce.
Instead, Britain needs to use its unique institutions in a more radical way. Ahead of the Royal Charter renewal next year, the BBC now faces a critical crossroads: it could lead the way in building democratic alternatives and pioneer a democratic cyberspace, or risk losing its place at the centre of our public life.
This report sets out a radical idea for how the BBC could take a more active role in prototyping and scaling alternatives for digital public spaces.
What’s in the report
- The digital sphere is failing: the report argues that platform power, polarisation, and a breakdown of trust in online media constitute an overwhelming market failure. It argues that collective, democratic attention to reforming the digital public sphere is urgently needed.
- A new approach is required: the report critiques the UK's regulatory fashion to social media and cyberspace of the last 15 years, which it holds focused on light-touch correctives to laissez-faire. The paper then argues that a complex public good like the 'epistemic environment" requires a direct constructivist approach, not just indirect correction.
- Historical precedent: it draws a crucial lesson from the 1920s and 1930s, contrasting the US radio model, where advertising-funded media led to profitable, polarising content, with the UK's establishment of the BBC as a non-commercial, public service monopoly to ensure quality and public benefit.
- Philosophical distinction: this history highlights a fundamental difference in political tradition: the US prioritises an individualistic, "Frontier" conception of free speech, while the UK is traditionally more comfortable with collective action and rules to create an ordered public sphere where public interest is paramount. This is something that the UK should cultivate in cyberspace.
- Solutions for the future: the report sets out a series of BBC-led experiments to test models for a democratically controlled digital public realm – exploring everything from novel funding mechanisms to algorithm designs – that promote understanding rather than outrage.
Findings/recommendations
The report positions the BBC as part of the solution. The report puts forward that the BBC should, in partnership with leading British institutions, launch and lead an ambitious program of digital experimentation. This would be to demonstrate what a properly democratic cyberspace could look like, through prototyping new approaches to platforms, governance models, and user participation that serve the public rather than private interests.
This proposal would involve the BBC taking a much more active role in demonstrating alternatives for digital public spaces than it traditionally has, creating space for the bold thinking Britain’s digital future demands.
