Digital freedom and corporate power in social media

ABSTRACT

The impact of large digital corporations on our freedom is often lamented but rarely investigated systematically. This paper aims to fill this desideratum by focusing on the power of social media corporations and the freedom of their users. In order to analyze this relationship, I distinguish two forms of freedom and two corresponding forms of power. Social media corporations extend their users’ freedom of choice by providing many new options. This provision, however, comes with the domination by these corporations because it is based on their power of uncontrolled interference. Users could escape this domination through exit. One reason why they do not choose this option is that they would lose the benefits associated with the network effects provided by social media services. A second reason is that the power of social media corporations runs so deep that they are able to manipulate the autonomous decision-making processes of their users. Users are provided with many new avenues for authentic self-presentation on social media. By using them, however, users need to conform to a web interface that is designed by corporations to undermine self-control. Through these two mechanisms, corporations are able to promote an interest in users to present themselves on their platforms. Insofar as this works, they secure the users’ compliance to their domination through subjectivation. This double conjunction of choice and domination, on the one hand, and autonomy and subjectivation, on the other, makes the case that the very power of corporate social media stems from their intrinsic connection to genuine practices of freedom.

KEYWORDS:

• Corporations
• digitalization
• social media
• freedom
• choice
• autonomy
• power
• domination
• subjectivation

Acknowledgments

Research on this paper has been enabled by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Audiences at Universität Hamburg, Universität Salzburg and Venice International University gave me very helpful feedback. An anonymous reviewer and the co-editor of this special issue, Chris Neuhäuser, made excellent suggestions for the structure of my argument. Ugur Aytac, Roberta Fischli, James Muldoon, Thorsten Thiel, and Daniel Voelsen provided invaluable comments. I would like to thank all of them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. With the term ‘subjectivation,’ I draw loosely on Michel Foucault’s idea of an agent that is constituted as an autonomous subject by being subjected to power relations (Foucault, 1982, pp. 781–782). Similar to Lukes (1974/2005, pp. 88–107), I do not mean to accept Foucault’s view that this calls into question the very possibility of freedom.

2. I thank James Muldoon who asked me to clarify of this point.

3. While my argument depends on Pettit’s distinction between choice and autonomy, autonomy as such does not need to be conceptualized as ‘discursive control’ in Pettit’s (2001, pp. 65–103) sense. However, I will explain it in this sense in order to give a better idea of what autonomy means.

4. This idea of corporate subjectivation corresponds broadly to what Doris Fuchs calls ‘discursive power’ in her influential account of business power (Fuchs, 2007, pp. 56–63). No wonder that Fuchs (2007, p. 61) refers to Lukes (1974/2005) when introducing this form of power. My account of corporate domination could be interpreted as combining Fuchs’ account of ‘instrumental power,’ which goes back to Dahl (1957), with what Fuchs calls ‘structural power,’ as introduced by Bachrach and Baratz (1962). There are two main differences between our approaches: First, I develop these notions of power with a focus on theoretical discussions. Second, I relate the different forms of power to corresponding conceptions of freedom, in order to allow for normative judgements.

5. I thank Dorothea Gädeke for pressing me on the relation between agency and structure when it comes to subjectivation.

6. An anonymous referee was surely right in stressing this point.

7. This has been pointed out by Chris Neuhäuser.

8. This has been pointed out by James Muldoon and Chris Neuhäuser.

Additional information

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Andreas Oldenbourg

Andreas Oldenbourg is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Theory and Coordinator of an interdisciplinary research group on the normative foundations of democracy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. His research interests are in theories of power, legitimacy, and self-determination with a special regard to corporations, digitalization, and boundary problems. A recent publication is Workplace Democracy and Corporate Human Rights Responsibilities with Christian Neuhäuser in the Review of Social Economy (2020).