Reorienting Platform Power
Building a platform governance research network
On March 24–26, 2021, Data & Society will join 10 other global organizations to co-host the First Annual Platform Governance Research Network Conference. This blog post is intended as a further provocation of this call. The deadline to submit abstracts and/or participate in the network building track is February 22, 2021. We welcome applications from a range of disciplines and methods — including those not traditionally associated with platform governance and from diverse individual and institutional voices, including tech workers, activists, and community leaders — especially those from outside North America and Europe.
In the month since the U.S. Capitol insurrection, the event has quickly become a benchmark for public and policy debates about the role of platforms in shaping democracy. While exposing both the important gatekeeping role that technology companies play in today’s media system and the lack of government redress to-date, recent media attention on deplatforming has tended to reify platform power through a largely North American lens. This framing often obscures the global inequities behind content moderation decisions, and the far more challenging structural problems underpinning them.
How do we contend with the democratic harms currently associated with platforms and their market concentration without fetishizing their power in the process? Finding this balance is one of the motivations behind the First Annual Platform Governance Research Network Conference, set to take place virtually on March 24–26, 2021. This conference is part of a joint effort by several institutions to broaden the platform governance field and shape its future directions. It will consist of two parts: (1) a research track oriented towards scholars and practitioners conducting original research on platforms; and (2) a network building track for those individuals and organizations interested in the future governance and field-building of the network.
What is Platform Governance Research?
Platform governance is a burgeoning but fairly recent scholarly umbrella for “the interplay between platform policies and a complex mesh of regulatory instruments.” Although previously spread across disciplinary silos (for instance, of groups studying internet law or data privacy), platform governance research now extends a longer-term endeavor to understand what internet governance scholar Laura DeNardis defines as the “private mediation between Internet content and the humans who provide and access this content.” More broadly, platform governance research includes and considers how a range of actors, communities, institutions, and tactics work to routinely and reflexively affect the politics and governance of “big tech.”
Work within this field explores the political effects of digital intermediaries and their market concentration. It does this by asking how platforms mediate important decisions about public life and become new kinds of private governors in the process. Platform governance research also explores how platforms are currently enmeshed in international regulatory processes and uneven distributions of political power.
Against Platform Determinism
Despite the abundance of critical work underway in platform governance research, deterministic narratives of platform power risk flattening the deeply situated and differential economic, political, and cultural conditions under which global platforms operate around the world—and under which users and institutions mediate and shape them. Also, they risk fetishizing a Western legal and policy focus, which might (not unlike other kinds of technological determinism) make it easier for research and policy interventions to slip into the trap of reinforcing, rather than critically reorienting, the market logic and self-interest of a handful of popular platforms.
Thus, this conference will purposely build on recent efforts to interrogate platform power, while placing this power within relevant social, political, and economic contexts. This was precisely the aim of the inaugural Data & Society academic workshop, “Against Platform Determinism” which served as a counter frame to “consider how platforms, given their centrality within our economies and cultural imagination, have overdetermined these same critiques, further entrenching the mystique of platforms’ power.” Invited participants, including scholars, technologists, and activists, were tasked with “flipping the script on platformization to ask how institutions, individuals, and infrastructures mediate and shape platform power.” These conversations will continue at the second installment of “Against Platform Determinism: Cohort II” this time hosted by the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy on March 3, 2021.
Building a Research Network
As a fairly recent academic crystallization, the field of platform governance is still experiencing growing pains: research often remains fragmented by discipline, methods, and region; focuses only on the largest user-generated platforms; or silos specific policy problems, such as competition, data protection, or content regulation, rather than asking how they might intersect. Research mobilization and field building has certainly been advanced by interdisciplinary spaces, such as COCONET and conferences like AoIR, FAccT, or GIGANET, but no unifying venue currently exists for these broader communities to talk to one another and to foster cross collaborations. More importantly, research by the most affected communities often remains excluded.
With this in mind, we aim to build a new research network that coalesces a global conversation about platform governance, while highlighting underrepresented groups and disciplines. We invite submissions to participate in research discussions and network building by February 22, 2021. Note that no abstracts are needed to participate in the network building track on the final day of the conference.
Submissions to the research track can include empirical studies of platform governance in all its forms, as well as normative or conceptual insights that highlight gaps in current public or academic conceptions of platform governance. We also welcome policy-oriented analyses of private and governmental efforts to regulate platforms, in addition to work on the relations and strategies across different actors — including policy, academia, and civil society. For a breakdown of the different questions we seek to answer, please read the call for papers.
The conference aims to bring together diverse actors and different disciplines, methods, and approaches that may not be typically associated with platform governance research. We are asking participants to move beyond focusing on the current state of the research landscape. We would like to identify the major barriers to research from different subfields and geographical and cultural sites, and hopefully spark future collaborations that strive to overcome extant limitations.
We are intentional (but can always improve!) about involving participation from the Global South in an effort to underscore the wide range of innovative governance frameworks emerging from leading sites of technological innovation more broadly.
In order to do so, the definition and role of “expert” needs to be separated from institutional privilege. As such, we especially welcome participation from BIPOC and LGBTQIA community organizers, activists, civil society actors, and a broad range of alarm ringers, whistleblowers, gig workers, and tech organizers. We recognize that these groups have historically been disproportionately affected by, and long at the forefront of addressing, the lack of fair and accountable platform governance.
As platform companies increasingly call on us to treat them as private states or supra-governments rather than as media companies, research on platform governance must respond in ways that reorient rather than reify platform power.
Sonja Solomun is a Data & Society Affiliate and Research Director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy. She is completing her PhD at the Department of Communication Studies, McGill.
