Participatory Platform Governance Lab [PPGLab]
At the Participatory Platform Governance Lab, we investigate how users experience, enact, and challenge the governance of social media platforms. Our goal is to understand the possibilities for political participation in sociotechnical systems and incorporate user perspectives into policy recommendations.
Publications
Copyright callouts and the promise of creator-driven platform governance
Responding to frustrations with the enforcement of copyright on YouTube, some creators publish videos that discuss their experiences, challenge claims of infringement, and critique broader structures of content moderation. Platform callouts, or public complaints about the conduct of or on platforms, are one of the primary ways creators challenge the power imbalance between users and corporations. Through an analysis of 135 videos, we provide a rich empirical account of how creators publicly define the problem of copyright enforcement, propose solutions, and attribute responsibility to other creators, the platform, and external actors like media conglomerates. Creators criticise the prevalence of “false” copyright claims that ignore fair use or serve ulterior motives like harassment, censorship, and financial extortion, as well as the challenges of communicating with the platform. Drawing inspiration from organisational theory, we differentiate horizontal and vertical callouts according to the institutional positioning of the speaker and target. Horizontal callouts, or public complaints between peers, offer a mechanism for community self-policing, while vertical callouts, or public complaints directed towards organisations, provide a mechanism for influencing centralised content moderation policies and practices. We conclude with a discussion of the benefits and limitations of callouts as a strategy of creator-driven platform governance.
Projects
Aspirational platform governance: How creators legitimise content moderation through accusations of bias
The crisis of trust surrounding commercial social media platforms has motivated an interest in community input on platform governance. However, such approaches are notoriously difficult to scale, especially on centralised platforms that lack bounded communities or tools to support collective governance. Working within these limitations, we use a high-profile debate surrounding bias and racism in content moderation on YouTube to investigate how creators engage in meta-moderation, the participatory evaluation of content moderation decisions and policies. We conceptualise the conversation that played out across networks of videos and comments as aspirational platform governance, or the desire to influence content moderation policies and practices without established channels or guarantees of success. Aspirational platform governance describes an informal strategy where a network of users share experiences, shape community norms, and place pressure on content moderation decisions. Through a content analysis of 115 videos and associated online discourse, we identify overlapping and competing understandings of bias, with key fault lines around demographic categories of gender, race, and geography, as well as genres of production and channel size. We analyse how reaction videos navigate structural factors that inhibit discussions of platform practices and conclude by assessing the functions of aspirational platform governance, including its counter-intuitive role in legitimising content moderation through the airing of complaints.
From Community Guidelines to industry standards: Mapping the policy priorities of mainstream, alternative, and adult live content platforms
Despite growing concern over the standardization of content moderation, there has been little empirical investigation beyond mainstream social media. We developed a novel approach to compare rules and policy priorities within Community Guidelines based on categories from the Trust and Safety Professionals Association. We focused on livestreaming, a particularly challenging format to moderate, and asked: what policies govern content? And how do mainstream, alternative, and adult content platforms differ? We analyzed 12 platforms and identified four orientations towards industry standards: the mainstream ideal, the regulatory competitor, the alternative ethos, and the overlooked concerns. These orientations partially map onto divisions between mainstream, alternative, and adult livestreaming platforms, allowing us to pinpoint different factors driving the adoption of industry standards. Finally, we discuss the tradeoff between free expression and sexual expression, highlight epistemological considerations regarding the use of policy documents, and conclude with an agenda for future comparative research.
Community Notes as a participatory strategy of consumer protection
X — then Twitter — launched Community Notes, a crowd-sourced fact-checking program, in 2021, allowing participants to attach “notes” that contextualize, contest, or clarify posts on the platform. While Community Notes engages in conventional fact-checking tasks of verifying news and political discourse, it also plays an important role drawing attention to spam, scams, fraud, and other consumer protection issues on the platform. Through a combination of qualitative and computational text analysis of consumer protection-oriented Community Notes, we identify the types of consumer protection issues that the program flags, the sources of evidence participants use, and the relationship between the presence of community notes and other top-down content moderation responses (removal of post, removal of account). We then reflect on the potential and limitations of participatory approaches for addressing consumer harms on social media.
Team Members
Isabell Knief
Isabell Knief is an MA student at the University of Bonn and a visiting research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She examines how digital platforms (re)produce power relations in labor, creating new opportunities and vulnerabilities for workers, as well as posing novel regulatory challenges. Her master's thesis examines informal counter-practices that webcam models use to influence the algorithmic work environment and assert their interests.
CJ Reynolds
CJ Reynolds is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. CJ researches the role of institutional mistrust in state and platform contexts, and the development of counterpower tactics to push for transparency and accountability from institutions.
Omer Rothenstein
Omer Rothenstein is an MA student in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a Bachelor of Computer Science and Communication and Journalism, he studies how technology and society converge and coalesce, with a focus on digital culture and internet platforms.
Dana Theiler
Dana Theiler is a dual BA student in Communication and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. With experience as a marketing manager working with various social media platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and more), she examines the power of social media for self-promotion, cross-platform promotional strategies, and the power relations between platforms and users.
Noa Niv
Noa Niv is an MA student in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. With a bachelor’s degree in Communication and Journalism and East Asian Studies, she explores cross-cultural interactions on social media, focusing on the dynamics between Western and East Asian individuals in the context of popular culture and online fandom.
Yehonatan Kuperberg
Yehonatan Kuperberg (Kuper) is an MA student in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He holds a bachelor's degree in Communication & Journalism and Political Science, along with personal experience in TV and news production. He explores the relationship between traditional producers and their covered agents or viewers and how they perceive television text or media production considerations.