Transparency and accountability of Big Tech
The liability problem
Section 230 of the American Communications Decency Act has freed big tech from accountability until today. Social media platforms, search engines and increasingly private messaging platforms and generative AI platforms have however moved beyond being a platform that provides a space for information to taking editorial decisions: their recommender and moderation algorithms define what gets visibility, their training data set defines what speech is allowed.
Citizens and news media are at the mercy of big tech, and their changing priorities, profit-driven nature, and in-parts political agenda to disseminate and access information.
Some jurisdictions, notably the EU and UK, have taken steps to install an accountability regime, yet implementation is still insufficient.
Similarly, researchers and NGOs are at the mercy of big tech to study their impact on society and democracy. Transparency about policies, algorithms and data access provisions have varied with changing political and economic interests.
This poses great dangers to society, as big tech govern a space which should be a public good in which transparency and accountability are key principles.
Our work on this theme
OSCE Policy Manual｜Safeguarding media freedom in the age of Big Tech Platforms and AI – in partnership with the Forum on Information and Democracy
This Policy Manual highlights how the current digital information ecosystem — dominated by Big Tech platforms (very large social media and search engines, and increasingly also AI companies) — has become increasingly captured in ways that undermine media freedom. It underscores the need for democratic state intervention, based on the rule of law, to ensure an enabling environment for independent and pluralistic journalism.
The Manual offers a vision for healthy online information spaces, where the availability and accessibility of public interest information are ensured. It puts forward mitigation measures and key recommendations for States to implement long-term structural reforms and sustained investments to address the distortions in today’s online information ecosystem.
The recommended mitigation measures cover three key areas:
• Visibility of journalism and public interest information online
• Media viability and funding models that support public interest information
• Vigilance, or the online safety of journalists
The core of this Policy Manual lies in the guidance it provides on how to enable healthy information spaces online by freeing the ecosystem from heavily concentrated gatekeeping power, and instead fostering an enabling environment for media freedom in the algorithmic and artificial intelligence (AI) era.
It concludes that for media freedom to be safeguarded, addressing platform-related challenges alone is not sufficient. Instead, it calls for more ambitious structural reforms — to move beyond merely mitigating media dependency and towards building an independent, pluralistic online information and media landscape that can sustain democratic debate and societal resilience.
This publication is part of the project “Healthy Online Information Spaces – SAIFE Renewed”. It was produced in collaboration with the Forum on Information and Democracy.
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