Governing Digital Platforms

This interdisciplinary project explores the promise and perils of human rights as a suitable framework for addressing the challenges posed by the governance of digital platforms.

Full project title

The Promise and Perils of Human Rights for Governing Digital Platforms

Project description

Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of digital platforms as the “core organisational form” of informational capitalism. Platforms constitute important sites of political, social, economic, and cultural exchange, typically underpinned by extractivist business models based on the collection, aggregation, analysis, and exchange of data. While platformisation is facilitating greater interconnection between actors around the world, many perceive it as threatening core social and democratic values – whether in terms of the expansion of corporate power under informational capitalism, the reproduction of colonial power asymmetries, the “gigification” and precarisation of labour, or the reification of racial inequalities. 

In response, policymakers, civil society organisations, and academics have begun to frame platform governance through the framework of human rights. Yet while it offers a salient language of social justice, it is unclear whether it is legally and conceptually adequate to address the issue. Critical literature suggests that human rights have been as likely to stabilise state and corporate power as to undermine it. Moreover, at a time of renewed regulatory efforts by states to rein in platforms, human rights discourse has yet to see any sustained self-reflexivity over its potential and limits as a vocabulary of governance in this domain. Platformisation therefore invites critical reflection on human rights approach(es) to platform governance as well as on whether alternative norms and frameworks of social justice are necessary.