THOMAS BRENNAN

I have previously argued that the theory of 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 while billionaires and multinationals exert the political influence they currently do.

However, there is another form of corrupting influence that neither Montesquieu nor his successors have reckoned with: the power to determine what people know.

It may ultimately be 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 meaningfully 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. This power has never been more concentrated or less accountable.

Concentration without precedent

According to Emarketer, Meta and Google command 53.2% of global digital advertising revenue in 2026, at 26.8% and 26.4%, respectively.

Meta alone is forecast to earn $243bn (R3.9-trillion) in net worldwide ad revenue in 2026, overtaking Google for the first time in the history of digital advertising.

This is not a story of two large companies competing in a market. It is a story of an oligopoly that is steadily absorbing the commercial oxygen that once sustained a plural media ecosystem.

Consider the South African experience. The recent Competition Commission’s Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry found global platforms such as Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and X dominate important gateways through which South Africans access information.

The commission’s research found 77% of respondents relied primarily on social media for news. Among those users, Facebook was used by 84%, TikTok by 47%, WhatsApp by 46%, YouTube by 45% and X by 30%. A further 18% identified search engines such as Google as their main platform for news.

Digital platforms have not been meaningfully bound by the ethical codes that govern every registered newspaper, magazine and news website in the country, despite the fact that both now decide what most South Africans read, watch and believe

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 and owned by companies headquartered on the other side of the world.

These platforms are not simply a neutral pipe through which information flows. It is 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 should also 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 the definition.

Category error at the heart of media regulation

The problem is that our institutions for holding information producers accountable, such as the Press Council, the Broadcasting Complaints Commission and the statutory licensing regime for broadcasters, 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 made sense when the printing press and the broadcast tower were the only chokepoints through which information reached the public at scale.

It makes no sense today. 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 of South Africa. Digital platforms have not been meaningfully bound by the ethical codes that govern every registered newspaper, magazine and news website in the country, despite the fact that both now decide what most South Africans 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.

However, there is a second, related failure hiding inside the first. It is not only that the market underfunds journalism. It is that the entities now most responsible for determining what information reaches the public are not regulated as media institutions.

South Africa’s own attempt to correct this proves the point. 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, most tellingly, 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.

Compare this to Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, which compelled both platforms 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 is a category error that results in power operating outside the perimeter of the rules built to constrain it.

Redefining power by consumption, not medium

Montesquieu’s great insight was that power needs to be checked by power. There need to be institutional checks and balances to ensure 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, whether it employs a single journalist or none at all. 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 four shifts.

First, 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, regardless of whether it considers itself a technology company, a social network or a search engine.

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. That would be impossible and incompatible with freedom of expression. Instead, the obligation would be to establish transparent and accountable systems for dealing with demonstrably false or harmful information and to provide mechanisms for correction.

Third, transparency of curation. If a trending algorithm now performs the function of an editor, then 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.

Fourth, accountability should be proportional, with funding obligations tied to share of consumption, set in law rather than negotiated case by case. The Competition Commission’s piecemeal, 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. However, 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.

Power that must be named to be checked

Montesquieu could not have imagined algorithmic feeds any more than he could have imagined multinational corporations with revenues larger than the fiscus of the states that host them. But his underlying 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 US President Donald Trump to power in 2016 and our own Bell Pottinger scandal under state capture.

As damaging as those information scandals were, the more insipid influence is the societal polarisation digital platforms have engendered.

If the algorithm’s objective function is to know how much attention it attracts, it should not be surprising that it serves you more information that aligns with your confirmation biases.

Humans love sweet things; no-one likes a diet of roughage. Yet any dietician will tell you how important roughage is for your general health. The same principle applies to the information you consume.

That is why my argument about economic power has a natural sequel. 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.

This is not an argument for censorship. Democracy depends on disagreement. It is an argument for accountability. We already accept this principle elsewhere.

A bank managing billions cannot say it is merely an intermediary between savers and borrowers and therefore bears no special responsibilities. Influence creates responsibility. The irony is that the digital revolution has simultaneously democratised publishing and concentrated distribution.

The first age of democracy taught us political power must be checked. The second taught us economic power must be checked. The digital age is teaching us informational power must be checked too. And that those who decide, every day, what the public is permitted to see must be held to account.