About

The Platform Governance Research Network brings together researchers interested in the politics, policy, and governance of the 21st century ‘platformized’ internet. We seek to foster cutting-edge interdisciplinary research that engages with critical social and political questions posed by a broad range of digital platforms. 

In particular, we’re interested in: 

• Empirical studies of platform governance in all of its forms, including the labor, technologies, and institutional structures involved, and the implications for users, platforms, communities, and society.

• Policy-oriented analyses of private and governmental efforts to regulate platforms;

• Normative, conceptual, or theoretical insights into aspects of platform governance, especially those that highlight gaps in current public or scholarly discourse;

• The meta-aspects of research as it relates to major technology platforms, and the (oft-contested) interactions between industry, government, academia, and civil society in the emerging platform governance research and policy landscape.

What We Do

The Network is centered around an international community of researchers. We host a major online conference and facilitate workshops, collaborations, and other informal and formal mechanisms to help build ties between researchers from different cultural, disciplinary, and geographic backgrounds.

We are interdisciplinary, seeking to pull conversations about various dimensions of platform governance out of their disciplinary and in-person silos. We work to maintain an independent forum for research and collaboration between academics and research-oriented members of civil society, and seek to facilitate and foster opportunities to broaden the emerging field of platform governance, not only in terms of depth and scope, but also in terms of access and representation. We’re looking to make these ongoing academic and policy debates more global and accessible than they currently are.

You can follow us on Twitter, and — soon — on Mastodon. We have a listserv for researchers and others involved in research community that you can join here.

We gratefully acknowledge the MacArthur Foundation’s support of our activities thus far.