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Contents

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2023

Paul Gowder
Paul Gowder
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Illinois

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Information
The Networked Leviathan
For Democratic Platforms
 , pp. v - viii
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/

Contents

  1. Acknowledgments

  2. Introduction: The Perils of Platform Misgovernance

    1. What Is “Platform Governance” Anyway?

      1. Why and How Do Platforms Govern?

      2. Political Governments Can Help Platforms Govern

      3. Platforms Need the Help: They Are Often Unable to Govern Their Users

    2. Scholars Have the Tools to Improve Platform Governance: Borrowing from Political Governance

    3. Where We’re Going

    4. Appendix to Introduction: Addressing Some Ethical Challenges

  3. 1The Nature and Problems of Platforms

    1. 1.1The Core Features of Platforms

      1. 1.1.1Positive Network Externalities

      2. 1.1.2Interactive Network Affordances

      3. 1.1.3Skim as a Revenue Model and Incentives to Scale (and Maybe Concentration)

      4. 1.1.4Recommender Algorithms

      5. 1.1.5Virality (with a Caveat)

      6. 1.1.6Diversity of People and of Behavior

    2. 1.2Platform Problems Are Like State Problems: There Are Lessons to Be Borrowed

  4. 2The Enterprise of Platform Governance Development

    1. 2.1Why Is Conduct on Platforms So Hard to Regulate?

    2. 2.2Why Build Capacity?

    3. 2.3How to Build Capacity?

    4. 2.4Objection 1: Is Private Governance an Oxymoron or a Danger?

    5. 2.5Objection 2: Does Platform Capacity Building Over-empower the Already Powerful? Is It Colonial? Imperial?

      1. 2.5.1Mitigating Platform Neocolonialism

      2. 2.5.2Facebook Probably Shouldn’t Have Been in Myanmar at All

      3. 2.5.3Dispersing Power: Simultaneously a Governance Reform and an Anti-colonial Measure?

    6. 2.6Objection 3: The Whole Industry Is Bad – Radically Remake It by Force

    7. 2.7A Cautionary Approach to Antitrust Law

  5. 3The Problem of Platform Knowledge

    1. 3.1The Problem of Knowledge: A Pervasive Challenge for Centralized Governors of Dispersed Populations in Changing Environments

    2. 3.2The Democratic, Decentralized Solution to the Knowledge Problem

    3. 3.3Participatory Governance Facilitates Legibility

    4. 3.4The Polycentric Mechanics of Decentralized Participation

    5. 3.5A Design Criterion for Any Polycentric Platform System: Adaptive Capacity

  6. 4The Problem of Platform Self-control

    1. 4.1Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t Plotting to Fix the Election for Your Political Enemies, I Promise

      1. 4.1.1Sometimes Failures of Self-control Are Just Failures of Corporate Governance

    2. 4.2Can Platforms Commit Themselves to Govern Consistently?

      1. 4.2.1Lessons in Self-binding from Political Science

    3. 4.3Organizational Tools for Self-binding

      1. 4.3.1Independent Enforcers (Like the Meta Oversight Board?)

      2. 4.3.2The Political Foundations of Credible Commitment: Recruiting Workers and Ordinary People to Backstop Self-binding

      3. 4.3.3User-Generated Sanctions for Company Commitment

    4. 4.4Toward Platform Rule of Law

  7. 5Actually Existing Platform Self-constraint … Up to a Point: The Meta Oversight Board

    1. 5.1What Functions Might the Oversight Board Serve? Does It Do So Well?

    2. 5.2A Defense of the Oversight Board’s Treatment of the Trump Case

      1. 5.2.1How the Oversight Board’s Trump Decision Serves as a Counterexample to Carl Schmitt

      2. 5.2.2Can Platforms Have a Constitutional Identity?

    3. 5.3Can Platforms Have a Liberal-Democratic Identity?

      1. 5.3.1Toward Participatory Platform Identity

  8. 6Platform Democracy Now!

    1. 6.1Can Platforms Be Governed Democratically without States?

      1. 6.1.1Against Naive Participation

    2. 6.2What Would Effective Democratic Platform Governance Look Like?

      1. 6.2.1Overlapping Governance Entities at Multiple Scales

      2. 6.2.2Genuine Empowerment of Workers, Users, and Nonusers

      3. 6.2.3Iterative Stakeholder Inclusion and Experimentation

      4. 6.2.4Robustness, of a Sort

      5. 6.2.5Robustness against Bottom-Up as well as Top-Down Threats

    3. 6.3Democracy within a Single Platform: A Sketch for Reddit

    4. 6.4A Democratic Constitution for Global Social Media

      1. 6.4.1Application: Managing Cross-cultural and Intracultural Social Conflict

    5. 6.5Is Any of This Realistic?

      1. 6.5.1Recognizing and Mitigating the Limits of Platform Constitutionalism

  9. Conclusion: How Liberal-Democratic Governments Can Act Now

    1. Interventions on the Platform Workplace

    2. Interventions on Platform Information

    3. Interventions on Human Rights Law

    4. Interventions on Competition Policy

  10. References

  11. Index

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  • Contents
  • Paul Gowder, Northwestern University, Illinois
  • Book: The Networked Leviathan
  • Online publication: 20 July 2023
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  • Contents
  • Paul Gowder, Northwestern University, Illinois
  • Book: The Networked Leviathan
  • Online publication: 20 July 2023
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Contents
  • Paul Gowder, Northwestern University, Illinois
  • Book: The Networked Leviathan
  • Online publication: 20 July 2023
Available formats
×