'The platform governance triangle: conceptualising the informal regulation of online content' by Robert Gorwa in (2019) 8(2)
Internet Policy Review comments
From the new Facebook ‘Oversight Body’ for content moderation to the ‘Christchurch Call to eliminate terrorism and violent extremism online,’ a growing number of voluntary and non-binding informal governance initiatives have recently been proposed as attractive ways to rein in Facebook, Google, and other platform companies hosting user-generated content. Drawing on the literature on transnational corporate governance, this article reviews a number of informal arrangements governing online content on platforms in Europe, mapping them onto Abbott and Snidal’s (2009) ‘governance triangle’ model. I discuss three key dynamics shaping the success of informal governance arrangements: actor competencies, ‘legitimation politics,’ and inter-actor relationships of power and coercion.
Gorwa argues
On 15 November 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a long essay titled “A Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement”. In it, he claimed that he had “increasingly come to believe that Facebook should not make so many important decisions about free expression and safety on [its] own”, and as a result, would create an “Oversight Body” for content moderation that would let users appeal takedown decisions to an independent body (Zuckerberg, 2018, n.p). In May 2019, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled the Christchurch Call, a non-binding set of commitments to combat terrorist content online signed by eighteen governments and eight major technology firms.
Such initiatives are becoming increasingly commonplace as debates around harmful or illegal content have resurfaced as a major international regulatory issue (Kaye, 2019; Wagner, 2013). The current “platform governance” status quo — understood as the set of legal, political, and economic relationships structuring interactions between users, technology companies, governments, and other key stakeholders in the platform ecosystem (Gorwa, 2019) — is rapidly moving away from an industry self-regulatory model and towards increased government intervention (Helberger, Pierson, & Poell, 2018). As laws around online content passed in countries like Germany, Singapore, and Australia have raised significant concerns for freedom of expression and digital rights advocates (Keller, 2018a), various actors are proposing various voluntary commitments, principles, and institutional oversight arrangements as a better way forward (Article 19, 2018). Important voices, such as the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, David Kaye, have expressed hope that such models could help make platform companies more transparent, accountable, and human-rights compliant (Kaye, 2018).
How should these emerging efforts be understood? In this article, I show that various forms of non-binding and informal “regulatory standards setting” have long been advanced to govern the conduct of transnational corporations in industries from natural resources to manufacturing, and in recent years, have become increasingly popular — especially in Europe — as a way to set content standards for social networking platforms. Drawing upon the global corporations literature from international relations and international political economy, I provide a proof-of-concept mapping to show how Abbott and Snidal’s (2009) “governance triangle” model can be used to analyse major content governance initiatives like the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation or the Facebook Oversight Board. After mapping out the informal content regulation landscape in Europe in a ‘platform governance triangle’ that helps visualise the breakdown of different actors in informal regulatory arrangements, I present three key arguments from the literature on corporate governance that the internet policy community should be mindful of as informal measures proliferate further: (a) the importance of varying actor competencies in different governance initiatives, (b) the difficult dynamics of ‘legitimation politics’ between different initiatives (and between voluntary governance arrangements and traditional command-and-control regulation), and (c) the layers of power relations manifest in the negotiation and implementation of informal governance measures.
