What is platform governance?

Abstract

Following a host of high-profile scandals, the political influence of platform companies (the global corporations that that operate online 'platforms' such as Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and many other online services) is slowly being re-evaluated. Amidst growing calls to regulate these companies and make them more democratically accountable, and a host of policy interventions that are actively being pursued in Europe and beyond, a better understanding of how platform practices, policies, and affordances (in effect, how platforms govern) interact with the external political forces trying to shape those practices and policies is needed. Building on digital media and communication scholarship as well as governance literature from political science and international relations, the aim of this article is to map an interdisciplinary research agenda for platform governance, a concept intended to capture the layers of governance relationships structuring interactions between key parties in today's platform society, including platform companies, users, advertisers, governments, and other political actors.

Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance

“…In the latter case, content is removed outright or prevented from being uploaded in the first place. A host of other specific decisions are also available, depending on the desired governance outcome and the preferences of the governance stakeholders that have informed the design of system (Gorwa, 2019b).…”

Closed or open platform? the nature of platform and a qualitative comparative analysis of the performance effect of platform openness

“…Government agents will intervene when there are fakes in a platform due to lower threshold and less control to the quality of product and service, such as the control practices by the Chinese government on the fakes of Taobao in the past. On the other hand, government agents will also intervene when there are discriminatory rules on higher threshold in order to ensure fair competition within the platform-based ecosystem ( Gorwa, 2019 ). Although the external environment variables such as government control have not been included explicitly in the model, there is evidence to support such an influence from the interviews and the exploratory case study.…”

Hacking democracy: managing influence campaigns and disinformation in the digital age

“…The main challenges here have less to do with immediate attempts at swaying public opinion, and more to do with the splintering of a shared public discourse, leading to new forms of political organisation with uncertain consequences, irrespective of whether the source of polarisation is foreign or domestic (Eady et al 2019;Farrell and Schneier 2018;Lin 2019;Patel 2019). In turn, the policy problem is not so much the spread of false information or propaganda by state actors, but the changing dynamics of communication and the growing power and influence of global digital platforms (Gillespie 2015;Gorwa 2019b;Just and Latzer 2017;Kenney, Bearson, and Zysman 2019;Mozur and Scott 2016;Tufekci 2018;Zuboff 2015Zuboff , 2019.…”

“…This points towards the larger societal complications caused by the structural change in political communication. Big data analytics and algorithmic governance have increasingly become a new form of governance in societies (Gorwa 2019a(Gorwa , 2019b, opening up new spaces of knowledge and control that did not previously exist, the implications of which are only now becoming evident (Amoore and Piotukh 2015). While bots, trolls and political advertisements may be short-term problems solvable by digital platforms in cooperation with governments globally, a far more fundamental challenge is the changing power dynamics between the two (Helberger, Pierson, and Poell 2018).…”