Enhanced self-regulation: The case of Facebook’s content governance

Abstract

Content regulation on digital platforms has become a contested issue on the public and scholarly agendas. To understand how digital platform providers experiment with making commitments regarding their regulation, this article process-traces Facebook’s content regulation to ask how it self-regulates despite constant pressures for policy intervention. The first part of the article shows how Facebook moved from its initial “thin” self-regulatory regime toward what I call “enhanced self-regulation,” which relies on first-party and independent third-party intermediaries. Thereafter, I show how Facebook self-regulated the balance between public and private interests over time and across the regimes. The findings suggest that powerful actors such as Facebook can innovate in self-regulation by reallocating content-related responsibilities to intermediaries and subsequently create polycentric governance regimes. Lessons about how self-regulators that face public criticism can make more credible commitments to public interests are then drawn from the strengths and weakness of enhanced self-regulation.

A comparative study on false information governance in Chinese and American social media platforms

“…Industry self‐regulation entails companies cooperating with each other to set rules for their own conduct (Porter & Ronit, 2006). Corporate self‐regulation refers to tailor‐made regulations established by individual companies (Black, 1996; Medzini, 2021; Puppis, 2010). Corporate self‐regulation is considered cheaper, more precise and more effective than industry‐level rules, which can be too complex or vague, and do not require industry‐wide agreement (Medzini, 2021).…”

“…As a transnational digital platform, Facebook has been subjected to significant scholarly, political and public critique concerning its broad legal immunity from user‐generated content as well as its private censorship, business model and self‐regulatory mechanism (Gillespie, 2018; Medzini, 2021; Nahon, 2015; Zuboff, 2019). A recent study shows that Facebook has innovated its self‐regulatory model and created a polycentric governance regime to make more credible commitments to the public interest (Medzini, 2021).…”

Elections, institutions, and the regulatory politics of platform governance: The case of the German NetzDG

“…If, in the absence of major international fora for digital policy decisionmaking at the content or application layer of the internet, platform rules are shaped by domestic regulations in various jurisdictions, as well as a smaller number of informal and voluntary transnational governance initiatives, this means that platform governance is likely to be significantly shaped by domestic and transnational institutional structures (Bannerman & Haggart, 2015). It is a complex undertaking, but there have been a few recent efforts to assess selfregulatory and informal regulatory initiatives for platform content through this lens (e.g Medzini, 2021;Gorwa, 2019a). Notably, the foundational work of Haggart (2014) has engaged with broader online content issues via study of the politics of global copyright, and has more broadly sought to insert more concepts and frameworks from global governance and international politics into the platform governance discussion (Haggart and Keller, this issue).…”

Governing the shadow of hierarchy: enhanced self-regulation in European data protection codes and certifications

“…When actors in a self-regulatory regime move beyond self-regulation mechanisms and rely on independent regulatory intermediaries to constrain their conduct and improve policy implementation, I call such a form of self-regulation via regulatory intermediation ' enhanced self-regulation' (Medzini, 2021b). The term ' enhanced' indicates that actors can delegate responsibilities to regulatory intermediaries in order to improve the credibility of self-regulation, for example towards accountability in data protection (Medzini, 2021a).…”