The Summit for Democracy Highlights Need for Global Leaders to Address Tech Harms

Center for American Progress, 29 mars 2023 |

We cannot expect technology companies to protect democracies if they do not integrate democratic values such as transparency, pluralism, protections against harm, and accountability into the fabric of their operations and governance.

When the White House hosts its second Summit for Democracy this week, Big Tech will be a dominant focus at a ministerial-level forum with representatives from government, civil society, and the private sector. This could not come soon enough, with mounting examples across the globe of how the misuse of digital platforms has damaged democratic discourse and strengthened the grip of autocrats.

But even as we applaud the resolve of President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to shine a spotlight on these issues, they and the leaders of other democracies must act to reclaim our collective agency in a world where regulatory governance is fractured. Private tech companies have a disproportionate influence over global citizenship—in fact, it could be compared to an autocratic system.

The danger here for our societies is powerfully noted by Marietje Schaake, director of international policy at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center:

There’s an information gap, a talent gap, and a compute gap. Together, these add up to a power and accountability gap. An entire layer of control of our daily lives thus exists without democratic legitimacy and with little oversight.

Democracy advocates must demand that technology companies uphold democratic values within their design, policies, rules of operation, and internal governance. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has given us a taste of what an autocratic platform can become: unpredictable, opaque, and dismissive of countervailing interests and viewpoints. We cannot expect technology companies to protect democracies if they do not integrate democratic values such as transparency, pluralism, protections against harm, and accountability into the fabric of their operations and governance.