DPIR alumnus Robert Gorwa releases book casting the spotlight on online safety and platform regulation
Robert Gorwa (DPhil International Relations, 2017) has published a new book which examines the key institutions, actors, and policy dynamics influencing emerging international regulatory debates around online safety.
The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation, out in open access with Oxford University Press, is an expanded and updated version of Gorwa’s 2022 Winchester Prize winning thesis.
It arrives at a moment where large technology companies like Meta and Microsoft having become important global governors, with their power to make and enforce rules about acceptable online conduct subsequently increasingly being contested by lawmakers and regulators worldwide.
The book aims to explain how, where and why different government initiatives to push back against the private governance of large technology companies emerge, with deeply researched qualitative case studies of policy development in various leading international jurisdictions.
Most work on online content governance to date has been done so far by legal scholars and media and communications researchers. This book provides the first IR-influenced analysis of digital politics in this area, and in doing so, refocuses the conversation around the minutiae of political contestation between different actors pushing for regulatory change and those resisting it.
The book is primarily aimed at the growing academic community working on technology policy, especially those focused on digital platforms. But it is published in a leading academic series (Oxford Studies in Digital Politics) that is also oriented towards a broader interdisciplinary audience of not just political scientists, but also communication, media studies, and legal scholars.
Robert said:
“I was super grateful to be able to begin researching this project at the DPIR, where I benefitted not only from the guidance of my supervisors Lucas Kello and Thomas Hale, but also was able to tap into the expertise of other leading scholars across the university (esp. Timothy Garton Ash, Victoria Nash, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, and Duncan Snidal).
“I’m really proud of the book’s effort to raise the bar for theory-building empirical research on this crucial - if still understudied - topic.”
Robert is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and increasingly working on issues at the intersection of private regulation, global governance, and complex AI systems. He is also collaborating with his colleague Michael Veale (a legal scholar at University College London) on a new book looking at the social, technical, and political challenges of effective public-private regulation in the AI development and deployment ecosystem.
The book is open access and is available free as a pdf from Oxford University Press – download The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation.
