Techlash, Platformization and the Struggle to Govern Online Content

This chapter adopts a comparative approach to examine the techlash and its aftermath. It begins by identifying major themes in the hearings between global governments and Facebook in 2018 and in the regulatory and policy responses that followed. It then turns to competing efforts to regulate social media through commercial actors and coalitions such as the World Federation of Advertisers. This comparative thematic analysis of the techlash demonstrates pressure on platforms from both governments and commercial partners. The chapter argues that the scale of social media has led private and public regulators to novel compromise positions, including partnerships between civil rights organizations and advertisers, in their attempts to find the pain points of global tech giants. We argue that policymakers’ attempts to apply financial and public relations definitions of good and responsible content in conflicts with the social media companies indicate a failure to challenge the “common sense” of global platform function (Cammaerts and Mansell. International Journal of Communication 14:20, 2020) in the face of the worst that social media has to offer. Looking towards the future, we note the investment in content moderation, rather than questions of transparency, user-targeting or user empowerment, as a point of particular concern.