I am very grateful that the Danish National Science Foundation has awarded me a DNRF Chair grant to support my new project “Power over Platforms?”.
Power over platforms?
The aim of this 3-year project is to understand how power is exercised over platform companies such as Google, Meta, and their competitors by actors who have neither raw economic nor formal regulatory or legislative means.
The focus is on how civil society groups, interest groups, professional associations, and companies from other sectors sometimes actively try to shape how platform companies operate. The starting hypotheses are that these actors (a) do this because they believe they are able to exercise at least some influence and (b) this is sometimes the case.
Systematically analyzing the actors involved in trying to influence key decisions made by different platforms on key issues—content moderation, privacy, and the use of generative AI for political information and speech—across different jurisdictions (the US and UK as major markets outside the EU, key markets inside the EU), and across different platforms (primarily consumer-facing content platforms including Google, Meta, and their smaller competitors TikTok, X, Snapchat, and Reddit) the project sets out to identify who seeks to influence platform governance, how, and what the outcomes are across countries and across companies.
The project builds on and goes beyond previous work on the “Power of Platforms” I did with Sarah Anne Ganter, and seeks to expand our scientific understanding of platform governance by analyzing a wide range of actors involved, some of whom have received limited attention from researchers. It aims to provide insights which can in turn help inform public and policy discussions about how to respond to the role that platform companies play in a range of important areas including free speech (through content moderation), privacy (data protection and encryption), and, with rapid development and deployment of generative artificial intelligence, new ways for people to exercise their fundamental right to receive and impart information and ideas.
This is an important area to research because platform companies increasingly develop and enforce principles, policies, and practices that go above and beyond what is legally required in defining what they consider acceptable behavior and content. But who, in turn, seeks to and sometimes manages to influence how the companies do this? When do they succeed? These questions are at the heart of the project.
I will be working with two postdoctoral researchers on the project (interested in these posts? Details here – apply by December 13) and various international collaborators.
I am grateful to the Danish National Research Foundation for deciding to fund the project, and to everyone in the Department of Communication and at the University of Copenhagen more broadly who have supported me and helped with the application process.
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