Understanding Global Platform Regulation

As digital platforms have become more integral to not just how we live, but also to how we do politics, the rules governing online expression, behavior, and interaction created by large multinational technology firms—popularly termed ‘content moderation,’ ‘platform governance,’ or ‘trust and safety’—have increasingly become salient sites of international political contestation. This project seeks to conceptually and empirically advance our understanding of both public and private rulemaking in and around social networks and other important online platforms, and push the boundaries of work at the intersection of technology and global governance, bridging political science, law, and media studies. 

 It has three main strands:

• Deep comparative analyses of government-led policy developments in leading jurisdictions around the world, from the US and EU to the BRICS countries
• Efforts to reconstruct the private decisionmaking bureaucracies - and processes of technical and institutional change - inside leading global corporations, such as Meta, Google, Apple, and TikTok
• Analyses of policy implementation and development, with a focus on the European Union and the development of the Digital Services Act and other related regulatory interventions 

The main project outputs to date involve a single-authored monograph with Oxford University Press, a number of journal articles, and the ongoing curation of a seminar on 'Platform Politics and Policy' at the WZB.