Platform Politics: Regulatory Contestation and Online Content in Europe

Billions of people around the world use services like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Youtube every day to access information, engage in conversation, and stay in touch with friends and family. These platforms for user-generated content have become increasingly enmeshed in the fabric of daily life, but following a host of widely publicized scandals, have also led to growing concern about the political influence of the companies that operate them. Despite the growing acknowledgement that these multinationals may now be influential actors in politics (Thelen, 2018), and mounting concern from scholars that have assessed the role that firms play in political campaigns (Chadwick 2017; Kreiss and Mcgregor 2018), our understanding of how these companies engage in politics more broadly remains limited. When do firms lobby against a regulation, and when do they bow to it? Why do they support (or contrarily, fight to undermine) specific governance efforts led by civil society or other non-governmental actors? By combining political science literatures on multinational corporations and transnational governance (especially institutional, and regulatory theories of governance; Jupille, Mattli, and Snidal 2017; Farrell & Newman 2018) with work from ‘platform studies’ in digital media and communication (Gillespie 2018; Van Dijck, Poell, and Waal 2018), I present a theoretical framework for political contestation in platform regulation. Using the case of intermediary liability rules --- which determine the legal obligations a platform has for the content shared by its users in a country or region; see Wagner 2013 --- I explore the preferences, incentives, and strategies used by firms, governments, and civil society groups seeking to influence regulatory bargains around digital policy issues, drawing on qualitative interviews with members of all three groups. By conceiving of intermediary liability as a political – and not merely legal – relationship, I offer an account of regulatory capacity that can better explain successful regulatory outcomes than existing approaches that draw solely on market power (Drezner 2008; Srnicek 2017), and begin to answer some major outstanding questions about the role that platform companies are coming to play in both domestic and international politics.