Governance, Social Media and Algorithms: Challenges and Opportunities for Traditional Regulatory Rationales and Self-Regulatory Models

Technology & Information Policy Institute (TIPI) presents a talk by Philip M. Napoli, co-sponsored by the Digital Media Speaker Series, Good Systems, and the Department of Radio-Television-Film.

This presentation focuses on the relationship between social media platforms and established rationales and mechanisms for media governance. This presentation begins with a review of established rationales for media regulation, with an emphasis on distinguishing between regulatory motivations and rationales. As this review indicates, the U.S. system of media regulation is grounded in specific and idiosyncratic technological characteristics of individual media that can be interpreted as justifying regulatory intervention. Some of these technological characteristics may apply to social media, but others clearly do not. The result is that the existing media regulatory framework applies to a diminishing proportion of the media ecosystem. This presentation next considers self-regulatory models; specifically, the model that is used within the context of the audience measurement industry in the U.S. As this presentation will illustrate, there are many points of connection between audience measurement systems and social media algorithms, which suggests that the self-regulatory apparatus that has been established for audience measurement may hold potential for social media.