Two blueprints for social media reform seemingly present a dilemma: either accept platforms as the rules of the public sphere (and use regulation to tame them) or divest platforms of power by disabling platform governance. That is a false choice, one that sounds like the “great difficulty” the Federalists discussed: protecting people requires government, but people also require protection from the government. This Article draws on the way out of the dilemma that constitutionalism builds on: dividing power.

Susannah Glickman is an assistant professor at Stony Brook University. Her research and teaching focus on the history and political economy of computation and information through the transformations in global American science that occurred at the end of the Cold War. She also writes about risk and uncertainty in other fields (for example, in the history of economics).

Shahrzad Haddadan is a theoretical computer scientist whose interest is primarily in the mathematical analysis of massive and complex data. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dartmouth College, privileged to be supervised by Prof. Peter Winkler.

Ela Leshem is a legal theorist who teaches and writes about the property and personhood status of human bodies, nation states, animals, fetuses, religious artifacts, venerated objects, and artificial intelligence. Her work has appeared in the Vanderbilt Law Review and Yale Law Journal. Before joining Fordham, she was a fellow at the Senate Judiciary Committee and clerked for Chief Judge David Barron on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Lily Hu is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Her current projects broadly concern causal theorizing about the social world, with a particular focus on causal inference methodologies in the social sciences, how these various statistical frameworks treat and measure the “causal effect” of social categories such as race, and ultimately, how such methods are seen to back normative claims about racial discrimination and inequalities broadly.

Liane Huttner is a legal scholar with research interests in data protection law, digital law and AI. She holds a PhD from University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has previously been a visiting scholar at the Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford, and at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg.