Defending the Fourth Estate against uncurbed digital platforms

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I have previously argued that Montesquieu’s separation of powers, written for an age when tyranny wore a crown, is insufficient when tyranny wears a suit. Economic power, left unchecked, captures political power just as surely as dictators can capture parliament.Society and the environment will not flourish so long as billionaires and multinationals exert the political influence they currently do. But there is another form of corrupting influence: the power to determine what people know. Indeed, it may become more important than economic power, because economic power can influence what governments do, while informational power can influence what citizens believe. Information is the raw material from which democratic judgment is made. Before citizens can vote, hold politicians accountable or participate in public debate, they need to know what is happening. Whoever has the ability to influence what information reaches millions of people, therefore, possesses informational power. And this power has never been more concentrated or less accountable. According to Emarketer, Meta and Google command 53.2% of global digital advertising revenue in 2026, 26.8% and 26.4%, respectively. Meta alone is forecast to earn $243bn in net worldwide ad revenue in 2026, overtaking Google for the first time in the history of digital advertising. This is a story of an oligopoly that is steadily absorbing the commercial oxygen that once sustained a plural media ecosystem. The recent Competition Commission’s media and digital platforms market inquiry found that global platforms such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and X dominate important gateways through which South Africans access information. The commission found that 77% of respondents relied primarily on social media for news.This is not merely a technological transformation. It is a redistribution of influence. These digital platforms shape how we vote, what we believe about crime, immigration, vaccines and the economy. It is delivered via algorithmic feeds designed to capture your attention. These platforms are not simply a neutral pipe through which information flows but increasingly the architecture through which public attention is allocated. And attention is power.Informational power should not be limited to who writes the story but include who decides where, how and by whom it is consumed. By that definition, Meta and Google are the two most powerful media institutions the world has ever had to contend with. Obviously they both go to great lengths to avoid that definition.The problem is our institutions that hold information producers accountable, such as the Press Council and the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, were built around the medium of production. If you printed a newspaper or broadcast over licensed spectrum, you fell inside a system of ethical codes, complaint mechanisms and corrections. That architecture makes no sense now. But what really matters is how information is consumed, and that is overwhelmingly via digital platforms.Yet Google is not a member of the Press Council. Digital platforms have not been meaningfully bound by the ethical codes that govern every registered newspaper, magazine and news website in the country, despite both now deciding what most South Africans actually read, watch and believe. Styli Charalambous made a related point recently: journalism’s crisis is not a story about newsrooms failing to innovate but about a market that structurally undersupplies a public good. The rise of Meta and Google has only exacerbated the issue by attracting an ever-growing share of ad revenue. He is right, and the remedy he proposes, treating public interest journalism as a public good and funding it through smart, capture-resistant policy, deserves serious attention. But there is a second, related failure: the entities most responsible for determining what information reaches the public are not regulated as media institutions.The Competition Commission’s inquiry extracted a real if modest commitment from Google: R688m to local publishers over five years. But its remedies addressed value transfer rather than accountability and left Meta almost entirely off the hook for editorial conduct, despite findings that its algorithmic deprecation of news content and its documented struggles with misinformation had done as much damage to the South African information ecosystem as anything Google had done.Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code compelled both platforms to come to the table. Our inquiry treated the platforms as an economic problem to be metered, not as media institutions to be held to account. That results in power operating outside the perimeter of the rules built to constrain it.Montesquieu’s great insight was that power needs to be checked by power. There need to be institutional checks and balances to ensure that no single source of power can corrupt the state. The same institutional rigour has not been applied to containing informational power.Informational power accountability must follow consumption, not medium. The relevant unit of measurement should be informational influence: how much attention a platform commands and how much information it determines people will see. Any broadcast, publication or platform that serves information is a media institution in every sense that matters. The question a regulatory system should ask is not “did you produce this content” but “how much informational influence rests in your hands”.Practically, this suggests the following shifts:Classification by influence, not medium. Any platform where the user base or share of time-spent-with-information exceeds a defined threshold should be classified as a media entity for regulatory purposes. The EU’s Digital Services Act uses 45-million average active monthly users as its line for “very large online platforms”.Second, mandatory participation in an accountability body. Just as every registered newspaper accepts the jurisdiction of the Press Council, platforms crossing that threshold should be required to submit to an equivalent body’s authority over misinformation, harmful content, complaints and correction mechanisms. The rules would not require platforms to guarantee that every statement appearing on them is true. The obligation would be to establish transparent and accountable systems for dealing with demonstrably false or harmful information and to provide mechanisms for correction.Transparency of curation. If a trending algorithm now performs the function of an editor, the public deserves the same visibility into that function that editorial standards have always required of newsrooms. The platforms should disclose how significant algorithmic decisions affect the distribution of public-interest information and give citizens meaningful avenues for complaint and appeal.Accountability should be proportional to funding obligations tied to share of consumption, set in law rather than negotiated case by case. The Competition Commission’s inquiry-by-inquiry approach let one platform pay and another walk away. A statutory formula tied to measured audience share would remove that arbitrariness entirely.The predictable objection is that this amounts to state censorship that undermines free speech, akin to the arguments against the proposed media tribunal under state capture. Yet, that is a false equivalency. The Press Council is an excellent example. It is an industry self-regulatory body, not an arm of government that imposes censorship. Its code requires members to report truthfully, accurately and fairly, to provide context and to avoid distortion and misrepresentation. Yet its jurisdiction is fundamentally based on who produces the content. That needs to change.Montesquieu’s insight remains intact: unchecked concentrations of power, whatever form they take, will eventually bend the institutions meant to constrain them. Political power was the danger of the 18th and 19th centuries. Economic power is the danger that arose in the 20th century. Informational power, which controls what a democracy believes, is a danger that has exploded in the 21st century, as demonstrated by the Cambridge Analytica scandal that brought Donald Trump to power in 2016 and our own Bell Pottinger scandal.The more insipid influence is the societal polarisation digital platforms have engendered. If the algorithm’s objective function is to be how much attention it attracts, it should not be surprising that it serves you more information that aligns with your confirmation biases. We need checks and balances not only between the branches of government but also across the different sources of power in society. Political power needs constitutional constraints. Economic power needs competition, transparency and regulation. Informational power needs independence, accountability and pluralism.The digital revolution has simultaneously democratised publishing and concentrated distribution. The first age of democracy taught us that political power must be checked. The second taught us that economic power must be checked. The digital age is teaching us that informational power must be checked too. And that those who decide what the public is permitted to see must be held to account.Brennan is the co-founder and CEO of Franc.Business Day