This research discusses how TikTok’s adaptation to Russian war censorship laws after the invasion of Ukraine affected content accessibility and prioritization on the platform. The study uses a combination of scraping and sock-puppet algorithmic audits to understand the impact of platform policy on information flows during times of war. The first test found that TikTok restricted access to non-Russian content in Russia, resulting in a 95% reduction of available content in the country. The second test revealed that TikTok unevenly applied its content policies, allowing pro-war content to proliferate in Russia despite its claim of enforcing a ban on new content uploads in the country. The third test highlighted a case of “shadow-promotion,” i.e., the prioritization of content supposed to be banned. The study's findings emphasize the need to monitor the platform's policy decisions during times of conflict, as they can contribute to the creation of a 'Splinternet.' The study also underscores the significant power that social media companies wield in shaping information flows during times of war and highlights the need to closely monitor platform policy decisions during such times. The article also provides recommendations for implementing the DSA in the EU context, which could help avoid problems such as those encountered while monitoring the platform in Russia.

Growing international efforts to address the problematic consequences of expanding platformization—like increasing data privatization and concentrated market power—signal the emergence of new regulatory regimes governing digital platform markets. Accepting that regulatory oversight is inevitable, digital platform companies intervene in policymaking to strategically limit its scope. By examining their lobbying and PR efforts across policy domains related to media regulation, competition policy, and data protection, this paper examines how platforms’ ambitions of global scale and scope, entail an attendant politics of scaling that prioritizes removing friction that regulation imposes in response to the contradictions, negative externalities, and market failures characterizing platform capitalism. This pursuit of frictionless oversight has multiple related dimensions. First, platforms seek to remove friction through standardization strategies to increase policy modularity that enables international scaling. Second, platform companies lobby for “frictionless regulation,” namely light, narrow co-regulatory arrangements that establish baseline standards (e.g., around political content, basic data protections, etc.), while limiting states’ roles to coordinating this standard-setting to enable smooth platform business operations. Third, platform companies couch frictionless regulation in legitimating discourses primed to resonate with policymakers, including the coordination costs associated with regulating many over few platform services. They also invoke permissionless data-driven innovation, exploiting tensions in policymaker efforts to regulate data to maintain citizen participation in the digital economy while preserving the commercial nature of ongoing datafication. This analysis has implications for identifying key points of contestation of platform-defined regulatory politics.

Across the globe, lawmakers have enacted a range of reforms targeting the operation of large digital platforms. Within the United States, however, the push to regulate platform companies—specifically, social media—has faltered. Neither standard interest group politics, nor partisan deadlock, nor the clash of liberal versus conservative ideologies adequately account for this situation. Drawing upon historical sources, an examination of political-ideational foundations, and an empirical analysis of recent Congressional hearings, this paper argues that an “anemic” policy regime has emerged for governance of the social media sector in the United States over the past two decades. Key attributes of this regime—its boundary-spanning nature, competing issue definitions, lack of policy cohesion, and administrative fragmentation—combine to impede the capability for problem-solving on the topic of regulatory reform.

In 1994, U.S. President Clinton stated that the commercialization of the internet was a “top priority” for his administration. The domain name system (DNS), which was developed to deal with the growing unwieldiness of the commercial internet, was an early battleground in shaping the values of early internet governance policies. The system would include highly sought after addresses in generic top-level domains (gTLDS) that ended in .com, .gov, .org, .edu, and so on. Below this were second-level domains and country codes which ended web addresses in sequences like .uk, .jp, .ca, etc. This model raised legal and economic questions about trademarks, intellectual property, and the global distribution of addresses on top level domains. Technical experts were wary of the limitations of the proposed system, particularly given the potential to expand the number of gTLDs. While many groups responded to U.S. governance policy, a number of non-profit associations were particular vocal in their critique, most notably the Internet Council of Registrars (CORE), the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC), and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) represented by Jon Postel. As the internet transitioned from a network used primarily by government and educational entities to a mass medium, there was a potential for revolutionary modes of communication, information sharing, education, creative expression, and a revolutionary, de-centralized structure of governance. The DNS debate resulted instead in support of predictable structures of power and a failure to realize that potential.