Abstract
This Essay explores what the ongoing politicization of Americans’ relationships to and through the technologies they use to interact online might come to mean for the workings of American government and for the constitutional law questions—especially First Amendment and separation-of-power questions—that depend on those workings. James Madison described the workings of government as a function of the interaction of human nature, law, and social movements (factions). From local newspapers to national magazines to radio to broadcast TV to cable news, experience has taught that a fourth variable—the communications technology through which people interact—is also critically important. In the recent era, whose end may now be in sight, a techno-political equilibrium developed through a symbiosis between ostensibly neutral “social media platforms” (like X and Facebook) and the two social movements that have long-traded control of state power in the United States—Democrats and Republicans. This symbiosis has driven emotionally charged political polarization in platform users alongside a policy environment supportive of platform owners’ wealth and influence.
Contemporary public law and technology scholarship sometimes assumes that this current symbiosis between ostensibly neutral platforms and long-dominant political parties will continue—that both the “separation of parties” and the separation of platforms and parties are constants to be taken for granted in thinking about the future of American government. But, while human nature does not change, communications technology does. The legacy norm of ostensible platform political neutrality is being eroded by lower costs of entry, increased interoperability, pressure from AI, and pressure from movements to reclaim for users the power that comes from their engagement. The result is increasingly open platform affiliation with parties or nonparty political movements or both that the Essay describes as “platform politicization.” Platform politicization means not just platforms’ use of political power but the politicization of participants’ engagement with and through platforms. Like the TV stations we watch, the periodicals we read, the color hats we wear, the towns we move to, or the cars (or Cybertrucks) we drive, people may come to see the platforms we choose to empower through our engagement as an expression of our political identities. That would bring an insistence that platforms use the economical, epistemological, behavioral, and associational power that comes from user engagement to serve users’––not owners’––interests.
This shift in communications technology from platform neutrality to platform politicization will have (and is already having) significant implications for American government and society, as platform politicization may yield either platform/party integration (strengthening both parties or yielding one-party government as major platforms associate either with Republicans or Democrats) or platform/party competition (weakening parties as emerging social coordination platforms become vehicles for a resurgence of nonpartisan American political organizing). Scholars, advocates, and courts thinking about the role of parties in the separation of powers and about First Amendment questions related to platforms should remain mindful of this empirical possibility of platform politicization and its two divergent paths of platform/party integration and platform/party competition. While exploratory, this Essay offers a normative thesis to navigate the complications platform politicization presents for First Amendment doctrine: Care should be taken that early doctrinal approaches do not inadvertently drive politicization toward platform/party integration, stifling the potential for platform/party competition. This prescription has implications for the freedom of association, campaign finance, state action, and jawboning.
Recommended Citation
Matthew B. Lawrence,
Platform Polarization?,
75
Emory L. J.
1301
(2026).
Available at:
https://scholarlycommons.law.emory.edu/elj/vol75/iss5/5