Guest lecture Robert Gorwa on transparency and accountability in platform governance

Last month, Robert Gorwa visited the University of Amsterdam and gave a lecture in the RPA Personalised Communication Lecture Series. Robert Gorwa is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Politics and International Relations. His research focuses on platform regulation, content moderation, and other transnational digital policy challenges. Affiliated with the Project on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University, Gorwa’s dissertation project examines the political role of large technology “platforms,” with a focus on platform governance and evolving notions of corporate power in democratic societies.

During his visit in Amsterdam, Robert Gorwa presented his study about transparency and accountability in platform governance:

As government pressure on major technology companies builds, firms, legislators, and civil society groups are searching for solutions to difficult governance puzzles such as hate speech and misinformation. A number of complex responses are emerging, ranging from the technical (the automated hash-matching and predictive machine learning tools increasingly being deployed to conduct moderation at scale by major platforms for user generated content) to the institutional (the multistakeholder summits, codes of conduct, and self-regulatory bodies developing as a major part of the platform regulation landscape). This talk will provide an overview of this ‘platform governance’ landscape, and reflect upon the new forms of transparency and accountability being enacted through recent digital policy developments.

Interested in more of Robert’s work? Read his recent report on Digital Media Policy Options for Europe (co-authored with Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Madeleine de Cock Buning).