Political actors engage in information manipulation by emitting propagandistic messaging through traditional, digital and social media spaces to accrue and consolidate political power. Such actors have been conceptualized as “informational autocrats” (Guriev and Treisman, 2019), in that they accumulate power through mobilizing propaganda and silencing opposition rather than relying upon traditional strategies of authoritarianism, e.g., violence. While scholars have identified the ways in which political actors execute propagandistic campaigns in recent autocracies, the strategies of these leaders in democratic environments is left understudied. Specifically, how these actors infringe upon advertising mechanisms as an additional pathway towards total information control. We investigate this pathway within states experiencing democratic backsliding; meaning, the weakening of democratic institutions and processes such as the independent media, free and fair elections, or judiciary autonomy. Both Hungary and Bolivia are experiencing democratic backsliding – here, a strategic weakening of the state by governing forces – through state sponsored propaganda via mainstream news and social media channels. We argue that the Hungarian and Bolivian states are manipulating the information ecosystem through its dominance over advertising mechanisms within media and technology industries. Through 30 qualitative, in-depth interviews we find that governing parties weaponize advertising revenue to accrue partisan favor, crush independent and critical voices, and flood social media feeds through its dominance over digital advertising.

Platforms have become dominant media infrastructures that mediate political interactions. While studies analyze the outcomes of platform logics, the underlying mechanisms that led to these outcomes are either expressed as general media logics or in technologically deterministic terms. Empirical challenges also make it difficult to disentangle platforms’ structural effects from other social or political dynamics. This research investigates the underlying mechanisms of platform logics that configure political interactions from a network perspective. It examines the structural configurations of networked political interactions on Twitter using Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM). It analyzes three election networks on Twitter during the 2022 Philippine Elections as cases and assesses the structural features of these networks, which correspond to structural mechanisms that configure political interactions on Twitter.

Preliminary analysis from two out of three of the networks suggests that Twitter promotes political interactions (edges) by facilitating more direct interactions among users (outdegree). It also facilitates more symmetrical relationships among accounts through reciprocated interactions (reciprocity). Specific to the media event network is the tendency to follow a cascade path of interaction (two-path), while the political event network is likely to create incentives for users who frequently interact with others (indegree popularity). Anticipated findings for the third network are discussed in the extended abstract. The study provides a conceptual articulation of the structural mechanisms of platform logics using inferential network analysis to define how platforms create path dependencies for political interactions.

As the EU Digital Services Act increasingly involves civil society organisations (CSOs) in the context of the development and application of its Code of Conduct, CSOs’ role in moderation policies requires further scrutiny. Theoretically, this paper seeks to contribute to platform governance as a complex multi-stakeholder dynamic process with unresolved tensions between different policy actors and their interests. At the European level, we can schematically understand this process to involve a triangle with three sets of actors: EU policy makers, platforms, and CSOs. We see platform governance as a terrain of struggle where no actor can unilaterally impose their will, but where power is exercised asymmetrically. Since CSOs are called upon to represent the interests of their constituencies and especially those communities that are vulnerabilised through harmful contents and current platform content policies, it is important to examine their role in the emerging EU content regulatory field more closely. In particular, this paper poses the following research questions: How do CSOs determine their policies vis-a-vis platforms? How independent are they from platforms and to what extent do they align their views with those of platforms? Empirically, the paper draws on participant ethnographic research in a leading CSO alongside in depth interviews with key informants and document analysis. The findings indicate that notwithstanding the aspirational role of CSOs in upholding fundamental rights and the rights of their constituencies, there are few safeguards against platform influence. This may end up compromising the crucial role that CSOs play in platform governance.

The question as to the most apt regulatory model to apply to the internet is one that occupies legislators, policymakers and courts around the world. This question was recently debated in two diametrically opposed judgments by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth and the Eleventh Circuit, triggered by challenges to the Texas and Florida ‘anti-online censorship’ laws. The Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit likened platforms to common carriers, disputed that their content curation amounts to First Amendment protected speech, and upheld the constitutionality of the Texas law. The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected platforms’ characterisation as common carriers. It argued that their content moderation decisions are First Amendment protected editorial judgements and declared the Florida law unconstitutional. These judgments did not address the closely linked, and equally vexed question whether users should be able to assert their free speech rights against social media platforms. In Germany, this question has been fought in a multitude of court cases, and has divided courts and commentators alike. The pending Supreme Court judgment and a possible German Constitutional Court verdict on the power of platforms to moderate users’ speech are likely to decisively shape the future of the internet. This paper proposes to contribute to this debate by adopting a comparative constitutional methodology to test, first, the historical analogies between old and new media employed in the Florida and Texas cases, and secondly, the limits of regulating social media platforms by human rights.