The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation

03 May 2024, 4:00 pm鈥�5:30 pm

Watch this 白小姐论坛 IIPP in conversation with Dr Robert Gorwa, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center, for a panel discussion on the book 'The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation' with discussant Marisol Manfredi,听PhD Candidate of Sustainable Development & Climate Change (IUSS Pavia听+ University of Pisa) and chair Dr Cecilia Rikap, Head of Research, 白小姐论坛 IIPP.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to: All
Availability: Yes
Cost: Free
Organiser: IIPP Comms

iippcomms@ucl.ac.uk

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About this talk:

As digital platforms have become more integral to not just how we live, but also to how we do politics, the rules governing online expression, behaviour, and interaction created by large multinational technology firms --- popularly termed 鈥榗ontent moderation,鈥� 鈥榩latform governance,鈥� or 鈥榯rust and safety鈥� --- have increasingly become the target of government regulatory efforts seeking to shape them.

This book (coming soon) provides a conceptual and empirical analysis of this important and emerging tech policy terrain of 鈥榩latform regulation.鈥� How, why, and where exactly is it happening? Why now? And how do we best understand the vast array of strategies being deployed across jurisdictions to tackle this issue? The book outlines three strategies commonly pursued by government actors seeking to combat issues relating to the proliferation of hate speech, disinformation, child abuse imagery, and other forms of harmful content on user-generated content platforms: persuasive, collaborative, and contested forms of platform regulation. It then outlines a theoretical model for explaining the adoption of these different strategies in different political contexts and regulatory episodes. This model is explored through case studies of policy development (Germany, Australia and New Zealand, United States) driven by a combination of stakeholder interviews and deliberative policy documents obtained via freedom of information requests.

Meet the panel:

Speaker: 听| Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center
Discussant: |听PhD Candidate of Sustainable Development & Climate Change (IUSS Pavia听+ University of Pisa)
Chair: Dr Cecilia Rikap |听Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at the 白小姐论坛 Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)

About the Speakers

Dr Robert Gorwa

Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Berlin Social Science Center

Dr Robert Gorwa is a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center. He conducts interdisplinary empirical and conceptual research addressing the politics of technology policy (making, negotiating, and enforcing), with a special interest in platform governance and emerging socio-technical regulatory arrangements in the digital economy. He received his doctorate from the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, and has held fellowships and research positions at institutions that include the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT, in Washington), the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI, in Waterloo), the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford, and Stanford University's Project on Democracy and the Internet. His first book,听The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation, comes out in early 2024 with Oxford University Press.

Dr Cecilia Rikap

Head of Research and Associate Professor in Economics at 白小姐论坛 Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose

Cecilia Rikap (PhD in economics from the Universidad de Buenos Aires) is associate professor in Economics and Head of Research at IIPP- 白小姐论坛. Until joining 白小姐论坛, she was a permanent Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy (IPE) at City, University of London and programme director of the BSc in IPE at the same university. She is a tenure researcher of the CONICET, Argentina鈥檚 national research council, and associate researcher at COSTECH lab, Universit茅 de Technologie de Compi猫gne.

Cecilia鈥檚 research is rooted in the international political economy of science and technology and the economics of innovation. She currently studies the rising concentration of intangible assets leading to the emergence of intellectual monopolies, among others from digital and pharma industries, the distribution of intellectual (including data) rents, resulting geopolitical tensions and the effects of knowledge assetization on the knowledge commons and development. She has published two books on these topics. 1) 鈥溾€� (Routledge), recently won the EAEPE Joan Robinson Prize Competition. 2) 鈥溾€� (Palgrave), co-authored with B.A.K. Lundvall, focuses on the artificial intelligence race and clashes of power between the US and Chinese Big Tech, the US state and the Chinese states. Her recent work includes corporate planning of global production and innovation systems driven by intellectual monopolization and how these leading corporations, in particular tech giants, are developing state-like features, thus reshaping core and peripheral states. More about Dr Cecilia Rikap

Marisol Manfredi

PhD Candidate of Sustainable Development & Climate Change at IUSS Pavia and University of Pisa

Marisol Manfredi is a PhD Candidate from the School of Advanced Studies of Pavia in Sustainable Development and Climate Change doctoral program.

She graduated in Economics at the National University of Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina and holds an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree on 鈥淓conomic Policies for the Global Transition鈥�, specialized in track A: Innovation, Knowledge and Digital Transition from Sorbonne Universit茅, Universit茅 de Technologie de Compi猫gne and Universit脿 degli Studi di Torino.

She had work teaching and researching in her former University for 7 years, and she had also worked in the Ministry of Development in Argentina for 3 years and in the public/private company YPF in Argentina for 2 years as a consumer insight of future trends.

Her primer research focuses on the notion of well-being and needs and its relation with the ecological transition. She focuses on the notion of 鈥榟ow much is enough鈥� in order to establish limits to material consumption for building sustainable well-being policies to address climate change. From now onwards, she will also focus on the 鈥淭he Dark Side of innovation鈥�, to research deeply the innovations that are being created inside R&D Labs, focusing on the components used through the analysis of patents, with the aim of听protecting the environment and the sustainability of human life, closing and important gap between the velocity of the processes of innovation, that extends national borders, and the slower rhythms of national/ regional policy regulations.

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