Public Interest and Media Infrastructures: Regulating the Technology Companies that Make ‘Pictures in Our Heads’

Executive Summary

In this report for the Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression, Mike Ananny argues that social media platforms should be understood and regulated as media infrastructures — sociotechnical systems that make the "pictures in our heads" that publics rely on to think, feel, and act. Revisiting Walter Lippmann's 1922 challenge for the platform era, he contends that platforms' infrastructural elements are the best and most underexploited sites where regulation in the public interest can have the greatest impact.

Ananny traces how today's media system differs from Lippmann's: it now includes a largely inscrutable set of privately controlled, proprietary computational systems driven by advertising markets and optimized through machine learning, which convert "big data" into the stable stories that drive beliefs, commerce, and collective action. Platforms position themselves as neutral mirrors of society rather than active shapers of it, resisting oversight through claims of proprietary knowledge, the economic necessity of data harvesting, and promises of self-regulation. He argues that recasting platforms as infrastructure — rather than as channels or broadcasters — lets regulators interrogate the words platforms use, the errors they tolerate, and the exceptions they make, and can force technology companies to enact a public service mandate within their own systems.

The report concludes that meaningful infrastructural oversight faces real barriers, since acknowledging the ideological and economic motivations behind their algorithms would undercut platforms' claims to neutrality, and since access to their infrastructures remains tightly controlled — as seen in Facebook's limited-scope Oversight Board and restricted researcher access to its data. Ananny calls for regulators to exert the political will needed to force technology companies to grant researchers and journalists the access required to build a more publicly accountable media system.