Participatory Platform Governance Lab [PPGLab]
At the Participatory Platform Governance Lab, we investigate how users experience, enact, and challenge the governance of social media platforms. Our goal is to understand the possibilities for political participation in sociotechnical systems and incorporate user perspectives into policy recommendations.
Team Members
Tom Divon
Tom Divon is an ethnographer of user-platform dynamics, focusing on creator culture, platform affordances, and user-generated content. In his PhD, Divon explores TikTok's socio-political subcultures across three distinct domains: (1) Memory: TikTok users' engagement with Holocaust commemoration and education, (2) Activism: TikTok users' performative combat against antisemitism and hate speech, and (3) Conflict: TikTok users' memetic participation in nationalism-driven warfare, with a focus on Palestinian resistance.
Isabell Knief
Isabell Knief is an MA student at the University of Bonn and a visiting research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She examines how digital platforms (re)produce power relations in labor, creating new opportunities and vulnerabilities for workers, as well as posing novel regulatory challenges. Her master's thesis examines informal counter-practices that webcam models use to influence the algorithmic work environment and assert their interests.
CJ Reynolds
CJ Reynolds is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. CJ researches the role of institutional mistrust in state and platform contexts, and the development of counter power tactics to push for transparency and accountability from institutions.
Omer Rothenstein
Omer Rothenstein is an MA student in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As a Bachelor of Computer Science and Communication and Journalism, he studies how technology and society converge and coalesce, with a focus on digital culture and internet platforms.
Dana Theiler
Dana Theiler is a dual BA student in Communication and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. With experience as a marketing manager working with various social media platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and more), she examines the power of social media for self-promotion, cross-platform promotional strategies, and the power relations between platforms and users.
Projects
Copyright callouts: Metacontent as the normative negotiation of platform power
This project investigates how users negotiate platform power in the context of copyright enforcement through callout videos where creators discuss their experiences with copyright enforcement, challenge claims of infringement, and critique broader structures of platform governance. We conceptualize callout videos as metacontent and argue that it is a tool of community governance that sets and enforces norms. Through an analysis of 135 videos, we offer a rich empirical account of how creators on YouTube conceptualize the harms associated with copyright enforcement and seek to influence the conduct of other members of their community, external actors like corporations, and the platform itself through public shaming and other normative interventions. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings, identifying the benefits and limitations of community-driven governance initiatives, and suggesting how such practices can be better harnessed to support other modalities of platform governance.
React videos as a tool to collectively negotiate content moderation and platformed racism
This project joins a rising stream of research investigating how social media users negotiate commercial content moderation and develop alternative strategies of platform governance, focusing on an old but under-investigated tool: the react video. Long a staple of YouTube, react videos do what their name says: react, whether to an event, a piece of media, another creator, and so on. Research shows that react videos can coordinate the behaviour of audiences and shape community norms around acceptable behaviour. Building on this premise, we turn to a recent and high-profile incident involving one of the most prominent Black creators on YouTube that set off a chain of react videos and a public debate over platformed racism and content moderation.
Policing platform cultures through community guidelines
How do platform policies shape the culture of digital platforms? The literature offers conflicting accounts of the role of policy documents like community guidelines and terms of service. On the one hand, researchers contend that platform policies are lengthy, difficult, heavily standardized, and ignored by most users. On the other hand, researchers contend that policies change over time in response to user practices, have been the subject of cultural contestation, and offer an essential entry point to the governing principles of digital platforms. There is certainly truth to both accounts, suggesting the complex status and significance of policies as part of a “knot” of governance, bound up with design and user practices. However, there is also room to further explore what kind of knot this is by comparatively analyzing the policies of platforms with similar designs but disparate cultures. Livestreaming offers a particularly apt site to conduct this kind of comparative investigation since it is less consolidated than other social media domains like short-form video and images. There are also strong cultural divisions between mainstream and alternative platforms, as well as between streaming and camming platforms that host more sexually explicit content. Accordingly, this study investigates the policy ecosystem of streaming and camming platforms, asking: 1) What types of behavior do platform policies prohibit? 2) What, if any, sanctions do they specify for violating policies? 3) How do both vary across different types of platforms?