This week Sacha and I participated in the second Platform Governance Research Network conference – an online get-together for scholars working on digital platform governance and regulation all over the globe. Our paper – part of a panel on bridging media and platform policy – was on the News Media Bargaining Code, and reflected the approach we took in our submission to the 12-month review of the code, as well as a recently released book chapter by Sacha, Derek and former CMT postdoctoral fellow Chrisanthi Giotis. We looked in particular at news quality, an issue considered at some length in the final report of the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry but which seems to have fallen between the cracks of the various regulatory initiatives flowing from that report.
The scheduling of this international conference made it difficult to see many of the other of presentations, but I did manage to catch a great session on Day 2, switching between two concurrent panels on legal and theoretical issues in platform governance. These papers looked at the problems of free speech, content moderation and intermediary liability, with perspectives from India, the UK and the US, as well as a recent turn in thinking about transparency towards the more-robust notion of observability. In practical terms this might see a move, for example, from bare reporting on moderation actions or plain-language explanations of recommender algorithms towards greater use of public APIs and databases of advertising and moderated content. It will be interesting to see if that notion gains traction in regulatory approaches as well.
Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow