Power over platforms?

The aim of this project is to understand how power is exercised over platform companies such as Google, Meta, and their competitors by actors who have neither raw economic nor formal regulatory means. The focus is on how civil society groups and others who try to shape how platform companies operate.

We research actors involved in trying to influence key decisions made by different platforms on key issues—content moderation, privacy, and the use of generative AI for political information and speech—across different jurisdictions (the US and UK as major markets outside the EU, key markets inside the EU), and across different platforms (primarily consumer-facing content platforms including Google, Meta, and their smaller competitors TikTok, X, Snapchat, and Reddit) the project sets out to identify who seeks to influence platform governance, how, and what the outcomes are across countries and across companies.