Reimagining Social Media Through Middleware: A Structural Path to Competition and User Agency
Most regulatory proposals for social media reform aim to mitigate platforms’ harmful effects without changing their underlying structure. Middleware, by contrast, is a structural solution that aims to create a new competitive layer between dominant internet platforms and consumers. In the context of social media, middleware adoption would mean replacing a platform’s single proprietary recommender algorithm with a marketplace of algorithms, giving users greater control over how their feed is filtered, curated, and ranked. Middleware could give users greater agency and reduce the disproportionate power social media platforms have over consumers, creators, and third–party businesses and apps.
This Article contributes to the discussion about middleware by identifying the regulatory prerequisites for its success. It argues that to prevent the middleware layer from collapsing back into old patterns of consolidation and unequal power distribution, its introduction must be accompanied by specific structural regulation. Social media platforms must be (1) compelled to provide mandatory and uniform access to application programming interfaces (“APIs”) and (2) prohibited from offering their own recommender algorithms (i.e., structural separation). The Article also analyzes the risk of middleware consolidation and its privacy implications.
PDF: https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2025/04/Singh-Social-Media-Through-Middleware.pdf
Author: Madhavi Singh
Volume 26, Issue 3