Editorial: when US platforms write reality, where are Europe and the EU's own platforms?

Stanford Graduate School of Business’s new Power to Truth series put on the table last week one of the most important conversations of this decade. Professor Anat Admati, who directs GSB’s Corporations and Society Initiative, sat down with Guy Rolnik to work through how power over information flows has shifted in the last decade — and how thinly democracy’s oversight mechanisms now stand against it. The half-hour-plus does not offer ready answers, but it asks a question European decision-makers should no longer dodge: when a handful of private platforms control what a citizen sees, hears and shares, what is left of public conversation? This is not academic deliberation. It is a structural state-of-affairs with a direct line to how Europe’s own economy, own politics and own security shape over the next ten years. And it is precisely why Europe’s task is clear, even if it has not yet been stated as sharply as it should.

Stanford GSB is one of the few places where Big Tech’s own generation is trained, and that is precisely why its internal critique carries unusual weight. Admati is not an outside regulatory hawk — she is an insider who acknowledges that the platforms’ business model has worked brilliantly in economic terms and given the world useful tools. But she also recognises that the same platforms’ power to define the structure of information flow has grown to a level where a single company’s or a single founder’s decision can affect an entire democracy’s operating conditions.

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Source: Stanford Graduate School of Business — Power to Truth, Anat Admati & Guy Rolnik, 4 May 2026

This is a structurally new phase that the West has not yet learned to live with. When 20th-century mass media — television, newspapers, radio — dominated public conversation, an institutional counterweight had been built around them: journalistic ethics, source rules, responsible editorship, communications legislation, competition law. The regulator knew where to point the tools, and the audience could tell editorial content from paid messaging. This structure was not perfect — nor was it meant to be — but it was recognisable and accountable. Over the last twenty years platform giants have moved citizens’ information flow in the same direction that this old media once worked, but without a comparable institutional counterweight. The choice of algorithm, the targeting of advertising and the moderation of content are made mainly through private companies’ internal decisions whose criteria an outside observer does not see — not the regulator, not the journalist, not the citizen.

This is the point where Europe’s role cannot be passive. I have written earlier in an editorial that Europe can no longer outsource its own security to anyone else — the same applies to the integrity of its own information environment. The United States will not regulate the harms its platform giants produce in Europe, because their economic success is part of America’s own competitiveness. China will not help strengthen the information infrastructure of European democracies, because its own model rests on the opposite foundation. The European Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act are openings made in the right direction, but they are only the first move on a board that requires many more. It is time to admit that legislative response is not enough alone — we need the institutional counterweight: European media financed by public and private capital, European research capacity for monitoring the state of the information environment, European open platform technologies that can carry public conversation when private platforms’ decisions take it onto another track. This is a cold ride for those who hoped platform self-regulation would suffice — but its time is over.

For the Finnish founder and decision-maker, Admati’s message should be translated into something more concrete than mere reflection on big platforms’ power. Every Finnish company that builds its business on Meta, Google, X, TikTok or Amazon platforms has made a strategic decision that its visibility, customer relationship and communication channel rest on a third party’s decision. This is a good decision as long as the platform works the expected way. But when the platform’s incentives change — the algorithm shifts, regulation tightens, ownership transfers, geopolitical tension sharpens — the company’s entire communication architecture can change overnight. This is a risk question every small and medium-sized Finnish founder should weigh more seriously than has been done so far. Owning the customer base through direct channels — email lists, own websites, own community — is not old-fashioned. It is structural insurance against platform decisions.

For European decision-makers the message is bigger but equally concrete. We need an information infrastructure that can withstand the fact that a handful of private actors can — whether they want to or not — change the terms of citizens’ information access with a single decision. This means resourcing European public media to a level at which it can hold its own alongside platforms; it means funding open platform technologies at a capital level that survives a decade of building; it means strengthening citizens’ media literacy in the education system so that every Finnish high schooler understands the logic of an algorithm at least as well as traditional media bylines. This is expensive, slow and politically laborious — but the cost shrinks compared with what leaving it undone would produce.

It is time to admit that the next phase of the platform economy will not be resolved by politely hoping that large companies choose right. It will be resolved by Europe building its own institutional counterweight. After that, Admati’s question remains open — who controls information flow when no one was elected to control it? — but building the answer is up to us, and to no one else. A free Europe will not survive if it waits for others to protect its ability to tell fact from fiction. It must protect that itself. And the clock on the time when this should be done is now ticking faster than ever.