News and Research articles on Platform governanceRegulation is moving platforms. But is it moving them in ways that actually protect children? A two-year comparison of regulatory monitoring data suggests the answer is more complicated than it looks.
This article explores how political fear operates as an infrastructural mechanism within digital platforms, reconfiguring democratic communication through algorithmic amplification, emotional governance, and regulatory gaps.
This paper proposes a voluntary user badge that rewards commitment to civic norms in digital platform communication with increased visibility, aiming to enhance discourse quality and restructure attention distribution.
This paper explores how the Digital Services Act’s Transparency Database enables platform observability, revealing critical insights into the practices of content moderation across the EU.
The struggles of African professionals shut out of LinkedIn reveal how digital identity systems, if poorly designed, can erode rights and opportunities anywhere, even in Europe.
This article explores TikTok's platform governance of monetisation by systematically examining the classification of influencers and monetisation practices in TikTok’s platform documentation.
Content moderation encompasses a great diversity of actors who develop specific practices. Their precise contribution to the democratisation of content regulation, and to the balance between public and private interests in platform governance, remains little studied. This special issue is an attempt at remedying this.
Ideological differences, financial precarity, and tensions within the milieu of digital rights civil society organisations involved in platform governance advocacy can undermine these organisations’ ability to advocate for reform at all, let alone engage in a radical redefinition of the terms under which (platform) governance takes place.
Although commercial social media platforms provide few formal channels for participation in platform governance, creators aspire to influence decisions and policies through expressive forms of civic engagement that ultimately legitimate platforms as arbiters of public discourse.
This article compares the Stop Hate for Profit campaign and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media to evaluate efforts that leverage advertisers’ financial power to challenge platform content moderation.
This study examines experts' role within the EU's Code of Practice on Disinformation, highlighting challenges in co-regulatory processes and platform governance.
An analysis of platform lobbying and policy influence during the Digital Services Act negotiations in the EU.
Despite few formal opportunities to participate in platform governance, social media creators use public callouts to shape community norms and place pressure on the platform.
Decentralised content moderation describes and potentially advocates for moderation infrastructures in which both the authority and the responsibility to moderate are distributed over a plurality of actors or institutions.
This study examines the role of Google’s video search in three media diversity areas: format-type diversity, source diversity, and structural-social diversity.
Media pluralism online calls for new policy and regulatory safeguards.
Advertisers’ concerns about “brand safety” and “brand suitability” are an underappreciated influence on social media platforms’ content governance, with concerning implications for social equality and the freedom of public debate online.
This op-ed is part of a series of opinion pieces edited by Amélie Heldt in the context of a workshop on the Digital Services Act Package hosted by the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society on 15 and 16 November 2021 in Berlin. This workshop brought together legal scholars and social scientists to get a better understanding of the DSA Package, in detail and on a meta level.
This opinion piece argues that current attempts at platform regulation will fall short if they continue to focus on platform size, or if they remain limited to particular normative silos.
This article considers the unique challenges of platform policies aimed at the off-platform misbehaviour of users through the case of Twitch.