"This Place Does What It Was Built For"

Abstract

Whether we recognize it or not, the Internet is rife with exciting and original institutional forms that are transforming social organization on and offline. Governing these Internet platforms and other digital institutions has posed a challenge for engineers and managers, many of whom have little exposure to the relevant history or theory of institutional design. The dominant guiding practices for the design of digital institutions to date in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and the tech industry at large have been an incentive-focused behavioral engineering paradigm encompassing atheoretical approaches such as emulation, A/B-testing, engagement maximization, and piecemeal issue-driven engineering. One institutional analysis framework that has been useful in the study of traditional institutions comes from scholars of natural resource management, particularly that community of economists, anthropologists, and environmental and political scientists focused around the work of Elinor Ostrom, known collectively as the "Ostrom Workshop." A key finding from this community that has yet to be broadly incorporated into the design of many digital institutions is the importance of including participatory change mechanisms in what is called a "constitutional layer" of institutional design. The institutional rules that compose a constitutional layer facilitate stakeholder participation in the ongoing process of institutional design change. We explore to what extent consideration of constitutional layers is met or could be better met in three varied cases of digital institutions: cryptocurrencies, cannabis informatics, and amateur Minecraft server governance. Examining such highly varied cases allows us to demonstrate the broad relevance of constitutional layers in many different types of digital institutions.

Disinformation by Design: The Use of Evidence Collages and Platform Filtering in a Media Manipulation Campaign

“…In recent years, however, this characteristic has been exploited as a tool by disinformation agents and media manipulators who use it to filter dissent and exploit computational propaganda techniques as they push content across platforms. Stakeholders including technologists, designers, regulators, researchers, and web users must challenge those with the power to change platforms to acknowledge how decentralized communication operates to serve both knowledge production (on the positive side) and disinformation (on the negative side); and must demand distributing the power to make design changes (cf., Frey, Krafft, & Keegan, 2019) so that commercial interests are not locking in the status quo. While there are many laudable values in technological design embracing decentralization, the current products of social media must encode accountability, transparency, justice, and co-design to overcome these new media manipulation tactics.…”

Understanding international perceptions of the severity of harmful content online

“…The debates about how to handle moderating contentious topics, like prize winning photos and misinformation, reflect a clash of different backgrounds, purposes, and values. Recent work has argued for a "constitutional layer" in digital institutions to make changes that are sensitive to local contexts [22]. Our research speaks to potentially highlighting this clash of values by examining how people from different cultures and countries perceive rule violations.…”

The Networked Leviathan

“…For example, they recommend rate limiting, Kiesler et al (2011), 151, 136-38, which companies many years later rediscovered through, for example, limits on WhatsApp forwarding to reduce virality; Hern (2020). 31 In the existing scholarly literature, Frey, Krafft, and Keegan (2019) argue, based on Ostrom's work, for the role of participatory design in regulating platforms. They bring together the notion of a "constitutional layer" for "digital institutions" (a concept including, but broader than, platforms) with a "participatory design" tradition in human-computer interaction to argue for the advantages of low-level (i.e., ordinary person, or ordinary user) participation in the basic governing processes of such institutions (including rulemaking).…”