On Whose Authority? An Empirical Analysis of Platform Regulation in Europe

Rules and standards of acceptability for online content and online behavior structure the daily action of billions of people around the world. For the past two decades, a host of political actors --- governments, regulators, transnational advocacy groups, firms, and others --- have fought to either entrench or change these rules to suit their preferences, using various strategies of legalized regulation as well as informal mechanisms of regulatory standards setting, such as codes of conduct and co-regulatory agreements. This paper presents results from a dataset of all regulatory initiatives affecting platforms for user-generated content in Europe (1999-2020). It includes both legalized regulations at the national and custom union level, along with informal regulatory arrangements, and provides a longitudinal snapshot of how these rules have evolved across a host of policy domains (such as terrorism, hate speech, and copyright) in the past two decades. Drawing on both political science scholarship on private authority (Green, 2013) and legal scholarship on platforms (Helberger et al., 2018), it codes regulatory initiatives for the amount and type of private authority being enacted through these regulatory efforts, seeking to illustrate how and when governmental actors delegate rule-setting power to private companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter.