Where Does Government End and Private Power Begin?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

We live in an era in which globalisation and the geopolitical environment have arguably made a certain level of coordination between private corporations and nation-states, known as public-private partnerships, conducive for achieving the interests of both parties.

The public-private partnership approach, however, also comes with some significant dangers and risks. Because despite the word public, far too often in practice the actual public seems to be left out of the approach.

In fact, often the advantage of the approach seems to be that public-private partnerships allows for a convenient end-run around the obstacle of the broader democratic process and any potential concerns the voting public may hold.

An example of public-private partnership is the way an unaccountable network of technology and media companies, along with ideological NGOs, now systematically remove and censor politically inconvenient information from the internet, manipulate search results, algorithmic feeds, and AI models, and boost chosen propaganda narratives.

Notably, the goal seems to be to manipulate and silence growing public criticism of elites’ anti-democratic use of public-private collusion on controversial issues like migration and climate change.

To make sense of this, it is necessary to understand a key term: “whole of society.” The term was popularized roughly a decade ago by the Obama administration in the United States. Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions.

For companies, it can involve complying with environmental and human rights standards when carrying out their business activities. For civil society organisations, it can include ensuring they adhere to standards of public integrity. For individuals, it can mean respecting the rules governing interactions with public officials.

In other words, the government together with corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens enact policies, creating a force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you make up your communal safety net, and even your neighbours.

A whole-of-society approach embraces both formal and informal institutions in seeking a generalized agreement across society about policy goals and the means to achieve them.

But there are, of course, dangers. 

“Facebook now is more like a government than a traditional company," Mark Zuckerberg himself has stated, in the way it sets social and political policies for its nearly three billion users, he acknowledged. What has emerged is a new form of monopoly power made possible by those platforms through which everyone must pass to conduct the business of life.

Social media has increased public access to information and created platforms for political activism. Yet some also say it is harmful to democracy. They believe digital media are a threat to democracy rather than an opportunity for increased political participation.

The problem is that online it is the big tech platforms themselves who have become the governments, the police and the courts, perhaps unwillingly. They make their own rules about what people are allowed to say. And it’s quite tricky and expensive for individuals to turn to the courts when it looks like a tech company has violated their free speech.

So when a private company gets to decide what is acceptable and what is not acceptable online, that can cause tensions for a democratic society. People were left wondering why Facebook, or X (formerly Twitter), prior to its purchase by Elon Musk, accepted some things from liberals, while it censored conservatives. Zuckerberg himself admitted this in August, writing a letter to Congress in which he stated the Biden administration had pressured him to limit free speech.

Internet platforms have become the equivalent of town squares, hosting much of our public debate. These platforms have an impact on our society and our democracies. And this means that they have to be governed by laws made by our representatives and run in a way that doesn’t damage democracy. Policymakers are faced with the challenge of strengthening accountability and oversight of social media to address such threats, without curtailing access to their many benefits.

Meanwhile, the growth of so-called “populist” movements across the Western world can be seen, in large measure, as a democratic backlash against the increasingly widespread use of public-private collusion to “solve” nearly every controversial issue that arises today. They can sidestep democratic debate and accountability on these issues in order to force through ill-considered policy changes which all-too often actively harm the interests of national populations. Such behaviour is utterly corrosive to public trust and the democratic legitimacy of institutions of all kinds.

It’s important to view the “whole of society” as a totalizing form of politics. It demands political participation from corporations, civic groups, and other nonstate actors. What the various iterations of this approach have in common is their disregard for democratic process and their embrace of social media surveillance. They therefore extend the state’s authority over formerly independent centres of power.

Will the incoming Trump administration in Washington take on the task of reversing this?