Internet freedom is fading in the new era of social control

Twenty years ago, the internet was a medium liberating people from state control. Now, the internet is increasingly seen as a threat triggering calls to restore state control over online behavior. The latest twist in this trend is the growing demand to criminally prosecute both users and platforms for unacceptable speech or behavior. How did we get here? 

Some view this phenomenon as a side effect of political struggle. In reality, though, it reflects the development of the medium itself: The internet progressed from undermining old mechanisms of gatekeeping to creating new forms of social control, now executed through digital platforms. 

The evolution of digital media makes stricter regulation of online behavior not only feasible but inevitable. 

Web 1.0: The global library with free access

The earliest version of the web, Web 1.0, granted people far greater individual access to information. This alone challenged the old order in which elites controlled the mechanisms of “manufacturing consent” through news media, education, and entertainment. 

Uncontrolled flows of information undermined the elites’ monopoly over knowledge. But information alone was not the key. It was not the content but the very mode of access — the medium — that began to undermine authority. A close analogy: After the printing press made the Bible affordable to the masses, it wasn’t the verses of the Bible that triggered the Protestant Reformation, but rather the ability of a layman to read the Bible independently of a priest’s choice, find inconsistencies, and question the Church’s authority. The affordability of access to the Bible made it clear, for the first time, that the Church’s perspective is just that: a view. 

In the 1990s, the freedom to browse and inquire disrupted the homogeneity of the dominant news agenda. For the first time, people gained control over what appeared on their screens. The message of this medium was the individual ability to browse and inquire at will — and people started doing just that. Traditional gatekeeping, which relied on a centralized and uniform agenda, began to lose ground.

Web 2.0: The emancipation of authorship and the revolts of the public

The 2000s ushered in Web 2.0, defined by the rise of user-generated content (UGC). The blogosphere and early social media emancipated authorship by granting people greater access to not only information but also self-expression. The early digital adopters — mostly young, urban, educated, and progressive — began informing each other, quickly realizing how significantly their views and values differed from the mainstream agenda. This led to what Martin Gurri called the “crisis of authority” in his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public. The Twitter revolutions — the “revolts of the public” — sparked around the world, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street.

Old institutions were clueless about how to react. They could not catch up with the changes because they simply could not catch anyone responsible for them, as there was no one. The dispersed, networked activity simply did not provide a specific target for traditional institutional countermeasures. In the battle between the bear and the swarm of bees, the swarm was winning, despite the seemingly prevailing power of the bear, who could take down some bees or even many of them, but never the entire swarm.

Soon, however, the counter-institutional environment of the internet underwent two important institutional adjustments. First, old institutions went digital and absorbed many of the bees into the ranks of the establishment. Having joined the political and corporate establishment, digital progressives found themselves in a paradoxical position: They needed to preserve their newly acquired institutional status while also continuing to dismantle the principles of the old world. 

Their struggle to maintain power while disrupting old values found resolution with the arrival of the next wave of social demographics on social media by the mid-2010s — older, less educated, less urban, and less progressive. This second wave formed a new swarm, whose collective indignation eventually found political expression in Donald Trump. However, the alliance between the old elites and the first-born swarm of digital progressives had already been formed and reshaped discourse-making in news, academia, education, and corporations. The later, conservative swarm became a useful symbol of the old world, giving the new establishment — composed of digital progressives and traditional elites — a new target to combat. This is why political polarization skyrocketed in the second half of the 2010s.

However, the absorption of digital progressives into the establishment was not the primary game changer for the internet. An even more profound environmental change was caused by the rise of algorithms, which transformed the formless blogosphere into institutional entities: digital platforms.

Web 3.0: The rise of algorithms and digital platforms

Instead of the blogosphere run by humans, social media evolved into an ecosystem run by algorithms. These algorithms began defining the relevance of content and human connections. They enabled high precision in the personal customization of news feeds and created business opportunities, including selling users’ personal data to advertisers. This advertising service proved far more efficient and profitable than traditional media could ever provide. 

A side effect of this adjustment was the economic decline of traditional media and the emergence of postjournalism. But the main outcome of the algorithms’ introduction was the coagulation of the amorphous and swarm-like environment into digital platforms: centralized corporations. The online public square turned into an online marketplace. Web 2.0 mutated into Web 3.0 — an internet with algorithms of relevance and digital platforms profiting off users. 

Algorithms were also tasked with accelerating user engagement. They boosted the visibility of content that would likely trigger more reactions. People were increasingly exposed to more agitating content and, in turn, conditioned to respond with more agitating reactions. This not only accelerated engagement but also further fueled polarization and online outrage, contributing to the growing public anxiety about the internet.

Before that, old institutions struggled to handle Web 2.0 due to its dispersed, swarm-like nature. The best they could do was bribe digital progressives with grants, academic positions, and corporate HR jobs. However, Web 3.0 introduced digital platforms as corporate entities bearing the risks of losses and regulation. Old institutions are well-versed in dealing with corporations. As a result, the revolt of the public had lost its momentum, allowing old institutions to begin restoring their power under the new conditions — without traditional news media, but with digital platforms instead. The snake has shed its old skin and started growing a new one.

Web 4.0: The platforms’ political compliance and the restoration of corporate control

With the 2016 election of Trump in the U.S., the power of internet platforms to shape political outcomes became undeniable. Digital platforms could no longer preserve their political neutrality, especially after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Fearing regulatory retaliation, the largest social networks banned Trump and thousands of his supporters. The elite control over discourse production, lost after the decline of traditional media, was regained through digital platforms. To deal with the swarms, the bear commissioned the beekeepers.

This development has given us Web 4.0 — an internet where platforms regulate users’ behavior to appease governments and avoid punitive measures. On Web 4.0, digital platforms not only provide services but also act as intermediaries between users and state authorities, restricting online speech and behavior at the state’s request in exchange for the license to continue doing business with users. They openly employ moral and political judgments regarding users’ behavior to protect public morality and democracy, as if appointed to do so.

It’s not a political conspiracy of the elites. Rather, it reflects the evolutionary logic behind the development of the internet into digital corporations that carry regulatory risks. Through this transformation, the establishment overcame the crisis of authority and restored its power. The convergence of the largest digital corporations with the state and its political forces was inevitable. 

Of course, there have been resistance attempts, aiming to preserve what the internet was 20 years ago: a venue for opinion exchange, free of any control. Two notable examples include Telegram, with its encryption and the cult of privacy, and X/Twitter, still embodying the anti-establishment ethos of early 2010s social media. Both heavily rely on the personal commitment of their owners and therefore cannot be considered systemic factors. 

The recent arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France has likely already made him more receptive and collaborative. Meanwhile, Elon Musk remains too big to fall, but his vast resources and now his close affiliation with President-elect Trump make his case even less of a systemic factor. The example of X illustrates the role of the individual in history rather than the natural development of digital media. It’s even quite possible that Musk altered the course of world history by buying Twitter out of the “censorship-industrial complex” — the previous Twitter would have effectively worked against Trump in the recent election. Ironically, however, after Trump’s win, Musk’s X/Twitter can easily convert into a platform controlling users on behalf of the dominant political force — precisely what it was becoming before Musk took over. Platforms are inherently designed to shape and therefore control users’ behavior. Besides, the need to define “lawful speech” remains and can and will be used for political prosecution. 

All things considered, while resistance to increasing control exists, it lacks underlying systemic forces and can only slow the overall trend, not reverse it. Recent events provide numerous examples of the growing control over digital speech on behalf of the state and political elites. These include Pavel Durov’s arrest, Hillary Clinton’s call to criminally charge Americans for spreading Russian propaganda, Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act extending criminal prosecution for digital speech, and, notably, the UK’s first-ever arrest of a user for posting false information. 

The criminalization of digital speech and behavior signals that online moderation — once primarily the responsibility of platforms — is now becoming the prerogative of the state. The establishment increasingly recognizes platforms’ previous efforts to control the internet as insufficient and is pushing for stricter punitive measures for both platforms and users. In the U.S., the pressure on digital freedoms will likely ease for a while after the recent election, but this will not change the global logic of media evolution. The establishment, regardless of political affiliation, will continue to strengthen business and regulatory control over digital platforms. 

Web 5.0: Digital platforms as proxies for state control through social scoring

What comes next? Web 5.0: the platforms exercising full control over people on behalf of the state and corporations through the mechanisms of social scoring. We may not notice it yet, but algorithms are already tracking our transgressions and adjusting our access to digital services accordingly. For example, Facebook can not only ban users for significant violations but also apply various degrees of “moral” judgment and punishment, restricting certain users’ activities for certain periods. For example, users receive “strikes” for certain violations; two to six strikes result in restrictions from posting in groups for a time period, while 10 or more strikes will lead to “a 30-day restriction from creating content.”  Although not yet termed social scoring, this already represents its essence.

Beyond socializing, nearly all human activities are going digital: banking, transportation, governmental services, and so on. The platforms providing these services are introducing some forms of social scoring, albeit in a scattered manner. For example, the credit score, which is now collected and calculated algorithmically from users’ personal data, directly embodies the concept of social scoring. Different insurance systems utilize customer scoring for actuarial calculations, but they also function as behavior modifiers. Many consumer platforms employ scoring to reward loyalty, but some, like Uber, also use customer scores for punitive measures: the lower your score, the longer you wait for ride-matching. 

In some cases, governments now impose restrictions on people’s access to services or online activities as a form of digital punishment. This is where the criminalization of online behavior is required. For example, some supporters of Canadian Freedom Convoy lost access to donation platforms and even their bank accounts after the truckers’ protest was criminalized. This shift epitomizes the Institutional Restoration: The same platforms that enabled grassroots mobilization and crowdfunding for anti-establishment protests during Web 2.0 are being used in reverse. With total digital platformization, the reversal use of this “network effect” allows reaching out to the grassroots and weeding out the non-compliant.  

The idea of Web 5.0 paints a future where platforms operate not only as businesses but also as proxies for the state, employing their power over users on behalf of governments in exchange for the license to keep doing business. The combination of censorship, algorithmic control, and the criminalization of online behavior will only grow more sophisticated as digital platforms continue to evolve and converge with the state. Both political elites and corporations seek greater control; the growing digital platformization of users/citizens will provide more opportunities to gain it.

Facing such explanations and predictions, people usually ask, “How do we fix it?” That’s the wrong question. One cannot “fix” media evolution. The right question is: “How are we going to live with it?” There are two main strategies: 1) resistance and 2) cooperation with the inevitable. The former entails self-sacrifice, while the latter necessitates specific media literacy aimed at environmental survival.