Published March 31, 2021
| Version 1
Journal article
Open
The existential stakes of platform governance and online content regulation: a critical conceptual model
Authors/Creators
- 1. JOLT-ETN / LERASS, University Paul Sabatier - Toulouse III, Toulouse, France
Description
This study introduces a comprehensive yet non-exhaustive overview of literature concerning the concepts of regulation and governance, and attempts to connect them to scholarly works that deal with social media platforms' content regulation. The paper provides fundamental definitions of regulation and governance, along with a critique of polycentricity, in order to contextualise the discussion around platform governance and online content regulation. Regulation is framed here as a governance mechanism within a polycentric governance model where stakeholders have competing interests, even if sometimes they coincide. Moreover, where traditional governance literature conceptualised stakeholders as a triangle, this article proposes imagining them as overlapping circles of governance clusters with competing interests, going beyond the triad of public, private and non-governmental actors. Finally, the paper contends that that there exists a timely need to reimagine the way in which we understand and study phenomena appertaining to public discourse by adopting the platform governance perspective, which is framed as the advancement of internet governance. Finally, the article ascertains to study the governance of online content and social media platforms not as a sub-section of internet governance but as a conceptual evolution with existential stakes.
Files
openreseurope-1-14428.pdf
Additional details
References
- Abbott KW, Snidal D (2009). The Governance Triangle: Regulatory Standards Institutions and The Shadow of the State.
- Beresford AD (2003). Foucault's Theory Of Governance And The Deterrence Of Internet Fraud. Admin Soc. doi:10.1177/0095399702250347
- Bernstein S, Cashore B (2007). Can non‐state global governance be legitimate? An analytical framework. Regul Gov. doi:10.1111/j.1748-5991.2007.00021.x
- Bietti E (2020). Consent as a Free Pass: Platform Power and the Limits of the Informational Turn. Pace Law Review.
- Black J (2008). Constructing and contesting legitimacy and accountability in polycentric regulatory regimes. Regul Gov. doi:10.1111/j.1748-5991.2008.00034.x
- Bostoen F (2018). Neutrality, fairness or freedom? Principles for platform regulation. doi:10.14763/2018.1.785
- Braithwaite J (2008). Regulatory capitalism: How it works, ideas for making it work better.
- Braithwaite J (2011). The Regulatory State?. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199604456.013.0011
- Braithwaite J, Coglianese C, Levi-Faur D (2007). Can regulation and governance make a difference?. Regulation & Governance. doi:10.1111/j.1748-5991.2007.00006.x
- Brousseau E, Marzouki M, Méadel C (2012). Governance, regulations and powers on the Internet.
- Bucher T, Helmond A (2018). The Affordances of Social Media Platforms. doi:10.4135/9781473984066.n14
- Büthe T, Mattli W (2011). The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy.
- Cammaerts B, Mansell R (2019). Platform policy and regulation: Towards a radical democratic turn.
- Caplan R, Gillespie T (2020). Tiered Governance and Demonetization: The Shifting Terms of Labor and Compensation in the Platform Economy. Social Media + Society. doi:10.1177/2056305120936636
- Carr M (2015). Power Plays in Global Internet Governance. J Int Stud. doi:10.1177/0305829814562655
- Davis M (2021). The online anti-public sphere. Eur J Cult Stud. doi:10.1177/1367549420902799
- DeNardis L (2020). Introduction: Internet Governance as an Object of Research Inquiry. doi:10.7551/mitpress/12400.003.0002
- Douek E (2019). Self-Regulation of Content Moderation as an Answer to the Special Problems of Speech Regulation. Stanford University,.
- Douek E (2021). Governing Online Speech: From 'Posts-as-trumps' to proportionality and probability. Forthcoming. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3679607
- Drahos P, Krygier M (2017). Regulation, institutions and networks. doi:10.22459/RT.02.2017.01
- Fan J, Zhang AX (2020). Digital Juries: A Civics-Oriented Approach to Platform Governance. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi:10.1145/3313831.3376293
- Flew T, Martin F, Suzor N (2019). Internet regulation as media policy: Rethinking the question of digital communication platform governance. International Journal of Digital Television. doi:10.1386/jdmp.10.1.33_1
- Flyvbjerg B (1998). Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for Civil Society?. Br J Sociol. doi:10.2307/591310
- Foucault M (1978). The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction.
- Foucault M, Burchell G, Gordon C (1991). The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality: with two lectures by and an interview with Michel Foucault.
- Gillespie T (2010). The politics of 'platforms'. New Media Soc. doi:10.1177/1461444809342738
- Gjaltema J, Biesbroek R, Termeer K (2020). From government to governance…to meta-governance: A systematic literature review. Public Manag Rev. doi:10.1080/14719037.2019.1648697
- Gordon C (1991). Governmental Rationality: An Introduction.
- Gorwa R (2019a). The platform governance triangle: Conceptualising the informal regulation of online content. SocArXiv. doi:10.31235/osf.io/tgnrj
- Gorwa R (2019b). What is platform governance?. Information, Communication & Society. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1573914
- Habermas J (1992). "L'espace public", 30 ans après. Quaderni. doi:10.3406/quad.1992.977
- Haggart B (2020). Global platform governance and the internet-governance impossibility theorem. Journal of Digital Media & Policy. doi:10.1386/jdmp_00028_1
- Helberger N (2020). The Political Power of Platforms: How Current Attempts to Regulate Misinformation Amplify Opinion Power. Digital J. doi:10.1080/21670811.2020.1773888
- Helmond A (2015). The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready. Social Media + Society. doi:10.1177/2056305115603080
- Hirsch DD (2013). The Law and Policy of Online Privacy: Regulation, Self-Regulation, or Co-Regulation?.
- Hofmann J (2020). The Multistakeholder Concept as Narrative: A Discourse Analytical Approach. doi:10.7551/mitpress/12400.003.0013
- Hofmann J, Katzenbach C, Gollatz K (2016). Between coordination and regulation: Finding the governance in Internet governance. New Media Soc. doi:10.1177/1461444816639975
- Kaye D (2019). Foreword. doi:10.7551/mitpress/11304.003.0002
- Kjaer PF, Vetterlein A (2018). Regulatory governance: Rules, resistance and responsibility. Contemp Polit. doi:10.1080/13569775.2018.1452527
- Koop C, Lodge M (2015). What is regulation? An interdisciplinary concept analysis. Regul Gov. doi:10.1111/rego.12094
- Land MK (2019). Regulating Private Harms Online: Content Regulation under Human Rights Law. doi:10.7551/mitpress/11304.003.0018
- Levi-Faur D (2011). Handbook on the Politics of Regulation.
- Majone G (1994). The rise of the regulatory state in Europe. West Eur Polit. doi:10.1080/01402389408425031
- Marsden CT (2011). Internet Co-Regulation. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511763410
- Marx A (2011). Global governance and the certification revolution: Types, trends and challenges. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1764563
- Mattli W, Woods N (2009). The politics of global regulation.
- Mazzucato M (2014). The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths.
- Mazzucato M, Entsminger J, Kattel R (2020). Public Value and Platform Governance. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3741641
- Napoli PM (2015). Social media and the public interest: Governance of news platforms in the realm of individual and algorithmic gatekeepers. Telecommun Policy. doi:10.1016/j.telpol.2014.12.003
- Papacharissi Z (2002). The virtual sphere: The internet as a public sphere. New Media Soc. doi:10.1177/14614440222226244
- Regilme SSF (2018). Habermasian Thinking on Civil Society and the Public Sphere in the Age of Globalization. Perspectives on Political Science. doi:10.1080/10457097.2016.1175805
- Salikov A (2018). Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Rethinking the Public Sphere in the Age of Social Media. Sotsiologicheskoe Obozrenie / Russian Sociological Review. doi:10.17323/1728-192x-2018-4-88-102
- Smyrnaios N, Rebillard F (2019). How infomediation platforms took over the news: A longitudinal perspective. The Political Economy of Communication.
- Stigler GJ (1971). The Theory of Economic Regulation. The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science. doi:10.2307/3003160
- Suzor NP (2019). Lawless: The secret rules that govern our digital lives. doi:10.1017/9781108666428
- van Dijck J, Poell T, de Waal M (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World.