How technology companies became de facto governors of public life—and how democracy can evolve to survive
Across the globe, technology companies have risen from innovative disruptors to powerful actors that are shaping public discourse, the democratic process, and individual freedoms. With the help of advertising, data extraction, and algorithms, today’s platforms influence what billions of people see and believe, yet they bear no legal responsibility for it. They manipulate this distribution with an eye only to profit, and they are heedless of the political or social consequences of doing so. These companies are entities the framers of the Constitution never contemplated, making political interventions they never imagined.
In Who Elected Big Tech?, Allison Stanger combines technological expertise, First Amendment scholarship, and political theory to explain how this happened and what it means. She traces the legal origins of platform power, shows how algorithms structure attention and quietly normalize manipulation, examines the evolution of content moderation from simple rules to opaque systems of control, and reveals why these questions grow only more urgent in the age of artificial intelligence.
Preserving human agency and values requires more than regulatory tweaking, Stanger argues. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how democratic societies govern the digital world. Stanger provides essential context for understanding our predicament and guidance for finding a path forward—before unchecked technological power erodes freedom and equality beyond repair.