The guide treats power as a feature of all social relations: a person's or group's capacity to influence or control the actions of others. It is not a thing somebody owns — it is a relationship, which means it can be described by who depends on whom.
Four ways power is exercised in a digital system, and who is on the other end of each.
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Who studies power: Global politics, political science, public policy, law, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Their shared question: who can make whom do what, and how?
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Four ways power is exercised online
By setting defaults
Whoever decides what happens when nobody chooses has decided for almost everyone.
By controlling access
Deciding who may join, post, sell or be verified is power over whether someone can act at all.
By deciding visibility
Ranking is not censorship, but what is ranked twentieth is not read.
By holding information
A platform knows far more about its users than they know about it, or about each other.
Why defaults are the strongest of the four: They need no enforcement and attract no complaint. Nobody is stopped from changing a setting — almost nobody does, which delivers the outcome without ever making a rule.
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Real-world examples you can name
Australia's News Media Bargaining Code — passed February 2021
A law designed to make large platforms negotiate payment with news publishers for content that appears on their services. Facebook briefly blocked news for Australian users while it was being debated; the law passed in amended form and several deals followed.
Who it affected: News publishers, platform users, and regulators elsewhere who copied the model.
Government internet shutdowns — tracked annually by Access Now since 2016
States order operators to suspend mobile data or the whole internet, usually during protests, elections or exams. India has recorded the most shutdowns of any country for several consecutive years.
Who it affected: Everyone in the affected region — including businesses, hospitals and students.
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica — disclosed March 2018; US FTC penalty July 2019
A personality-quiz app collected data not only from the people who installed it but from their friends, reaching tens of millions of profiles, which were then used to target political advertising. Facebook was fined US$5 billion by the FTC over its privacy practices.
Who it affected: Facebook users who never installed the app, and voters targeted by the campaigns.
The pattern: In each case the power was already there and only became visible when it was used. That is normal: power is easiest to see at the moment it is exercised, and hardest to see for the years it is simply held.
How this is tested — power is the concept examiners reach for most, and the one most often answered without naming anybody. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — structured question
- Part b: explain how a described organisation exercises power
- Part c: evaluate who benefits from a described system
Paper 2 — source-based question
- Q2: explain a claim about control in a source
- Q4: synthesise sources on who decides
The trap: “the company has power”: That is the question, not the answer. Say what the company decides, over whom, and what the other side can do about it.
Explain one way a platform exercises power over the people who use it.
Model answer plan
See the answer broken into clear points, with guidance on how each point earns marks.
Analyse the relationship between a platform and the businesses that sell through it.
Model answer plan
See the answer broken into clear points, with guidance on how each point earns marks.