Decentralizing Platform Power: A Design Space of Multi-level Governance in Online Social Platforms

This blog post summarizes a paper that theorizes the structural diversity of middle levels of platform governance online. This paper has been published in the open-access SAGE journal Social Media + Society.

In the months following his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk triggered an exodus of millions of users to competing platforms. Twitter is centrally governed, i.e., its moderation decisions are made by those in power at the company and carried out unilaterally to Twitter’s millions of users. In contrast, several platforms to which Twitter users migrated (e.g., Mastodon, Bluesky) are designed to offer more decentralized governance. For example, users on Mastodon can move between thousands of instances with different governance arrangements and moderation rules. This federated architecture creates a middle level of local administration constituting its independent instances on Mastodon. Such a middle level gives Mastodon a different approach to privacy, safety, growth, censorship, autonomy, management, and other fundamental governance properties, as compared to Twitter.

Increasingly, users are weighing questions of governance design when deciding what platforms to join. As platforms experiment with forms of governance beyond simply centralized, a more precise terminology to describe how a platform is designed to decentralize governance becomes necessary for differentiating between platforms. This is particularly important as the term “decentralization” carries many meanings. The distinctions between different flavors of decentralized governance arrangements can be characterized using a lens of multi-level governance, where end users, community moderators, and platforms sit at different levels. Thus, in this research, we asked: what is the range of variation in how platforms organize multi-level governance systems, and what are the implications of this range for the value users receive from their platforms and the content they volunteer to contribute?

Fig. 1: A depiction of multi-level governance in an online platform, with a top, middle, and bottom level and typical actors within each level.

This research contributed a set of dimensions to characterize the design landscape of decentralized governance on existing online social platforms. We curated this design space through an iterative exploratory process, combining findings from a rigorous review of federalism and polycentricity literature with insights gleaned from case studies and our prior inquiries into online governance. In this characterization, we focus our attributes primarily on the middle levels of governance. At middle levels, many interactions play out with end users at the lowest level of a platform and with centers of power, authority, or ownership that comprise the topmost level (Figure 1). We focus on middle levels because they are the main arena for low-level agents to collectively organize with or against each other, with or against top-level agents, and even to interact with other kinds of middle levels.

As it turns out, middle levels are ubiquitous in online social platforms. We draw upon contemporary examples in this work, including Facebook Groups, Twitter shared blocklists, Reddit subreddits, YouTube and Twitch channels, Mastodon nodes, Minecraft servers, WhatsApp Groups, and Wikipedia language editions toward an understanding of the general design space of multi-level social systems online.

Fig. 2: Our four categories of design dimensions, including cross-level, within-level, within-unit, and system-level dimensions.

As part of proposing dimensions for how middle levels can vary in structure and design, we identify the other parts of platform structures that a general framework for multi-level design would address. We identified four sources of design variation (Figure 2) in how online platforms structure multi-level governance:

1. Cross-level or “vertical” dimensions of how middle-level units interact with other levels

2. Within-level or “lateral” dimensions of how middle-level units interact with one another

3. Within-unit or internal dimensions of the middle-level units

4. System-level dimensions of the whole platform

In this work, we focus on cataloging cross-level dimensions in detail. However, by situating them in a broader design space, we give scholars an appreciation of the range of implications and tensions that any design decision has for other parts of the system.

Fig. 3: Cross-level design dimensions. These dimensions characterize the relationships and interactions between middle-level units and the top-level or between middle-level units and end users.

Our cross-level dimensions (see Figure 3) characterize the relationships and interactions (1) between middle-level units and the top-level administration and (2) between middle-level units and end users at the bottom level. We identify the following five dimensions:

1. Overlap of Jurisdiction: This considers the degree of overlap between the middle and the top level regarding their areas of responsibility: what are each level’s governance actions, and how much do those overlap?
2. Cross-cutting Membership: This indicates whether the membership in each unit is exclusive — that is, whether two units can govern the same user.
3. Degree of Autonomy from Above or Below: This measures the extent to which middle-level units can operate independently or have accountability to another level that constrains their autonomy.
4. Degree of Authority over Levels Above or Below: A related but distinguishable dimension to a middle-level unit’s autonomy from is authority over, which refers to the ability to regulate or sanction. Indeed, a middle-level unit having autonomy implies it has authority over something. However, piecing out the direction of its authority, like its autonomy, helps to distinguish different instances of multi-level governance online.
5. Support by Levels Above or Below: This measures how middle levels are supported by higher levels through receiving technical help or getting access to moderation resources. Levels of support from below could be quantified based on whether a middle level is wholly or partially user-run and user-funded.

We point to design implications of our analysis of multi-level governance for platforms and communities, including how to enable innovation and adaptation, facilitate social learning, foster healthy competition, and establish accountability. Our proposed dimensions aim to start a conversation that more closely links political science and public administration scholars to the platform governance community. We also discuss how a substantive research agenda can build upon our characterization of multi-level governance.

Given the competition in an increasingly fragmented social media landscape, we are entering an era where we expect a greater variety of governance structures will be attempted. Through our focus on multiple centers of power, we bring attention to how new designs can negotiate between the advantages of centralization versus decentralization toward more ethical, sustainable, and empowering online platforms.

For more details, please check out the full text of our paper, available here as open-access.