"Kendra Albert, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, has studied “legal talismans”—terms like “free speech” that tech companies use to give legitimacy to decisions (say a failure to ban a user) that do not involve only legal processes. Democratization is a bit different, Albert says, since democracy doesn’t have a settled legal definition: “The lack of specific meanings for democratization is a plus not a minus in the sense that it basically allows companies to make it mean whatever they want, while still invoking this theme” of civic participation."
Read more in Mother Jones.