The Soap Box as a Black Box: Regulating Transparency in Social Media Recommender Systems

Social media recommender systems play a central role in determining what content is seen online, and what remains hidden. As a point of control for media governance, they are subject to intense controversy and, increasingly, regulation by European policymakers. A recurring theme in such efforts is transparency, but this is an ambiguous concept that can be implemented in various ways depending on the types of accountability one envisages. This paper maps and critiques the various efforts at regulating social media recommendation transparency in Europe, and the types of accountability they pursue. This paper identifies three different categories of disclosure rules in recent policymaking: (1) user-facing disclaimers, (2) government auditing and (3) data-sharing partnerships with academia and civil society. Despite their limitations and pitfalls, it is argued, each of these approaches has a potential added value for media governance as part of a tiered, variegated landscape of transparency rules. However, an important element is missing: public disclosures. Given the deeply political and value-laden context of media governance, it is argued, this field cannot rely exclusively on technocratic, institutionalized forms of transparency emphasized in current proposals. The final section articulates the distinct benefits of public disclosures as a supplement to existing transparency measures, and suggests starting points for their design and regulation

Scraping By? Europe's law and policy on social media research access

This chapter discusses the legal aspects of researchers' access to social media data, focusing in particular on recent developments in European law. We see law as playing both an enabling and a restrictive role in facilitating platform data access. Identifying a number of shortcomings in current legislation, we argue for the creation of a sound legal framework for scholarly data research. The new Digital Services Act makes some promising first steps towards regulating programmatic data access through APIs, but many obstacles and ambiguities remain. Furthermore, a clear vision on the legal status of public interest scraping projects is still lacking. In the teeth of private ordering by global platform companies, as new gatekeepers in academic research, ensuring fair and rights-sensitive data access must be a priority for the (European) legislator

Operationalizing Research Access in Platform Governance

This Report identifies best practices for research access regimes in the platform governance context, by learning from existing legal frameworks in other domains. Meaningful research access is a precondition for informed and effective platform governance. Platforms play a central and ever-expanding role in modern society. Due to their influence, scale, and complexity, a wide range of expert research is necessary to understand their impact on society, and hold them accountable where necessary. Yet, the data access needed to perform this research is sorely lacking. Ensuring adequate research access should therefore be a paramount priority in upcoming transparency reforms. This Report contributes to the existing debates on data access by taking a step back from platform governance per se, and learning from other (regulatory) transparency frameworks in existence already. Specifically, the Report examines how key challenges have been tackled in other sectors, and formulates a number of best practices for a clear and effective research access framework in platform governance. The best practices for research access in this Report are drawn from two case studies of data access frameworks in two different sectors: environmental protection, and medical research. In environmental law, we consider the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Regime. This case study is instructive for platforms for what we term the incentive problem: the regulated party has strong incentives to oppose, avoid and obstruct transparency demands. In medical research, we consider the Findata program, a recent Finnish legal initiative for enabling research access to health data in a data protection-compliant manner. This case study is instructive for what we term data protection concerns: the reticence of regulated companies to share information that might be traced back to identifiable data subjects. The case studies reveal best practices for data access regulation.status: publishe

Enabling Competition & Innovation on a City Fiber Network

This report describes how the municipally owned fiber-optic network in Ammon, Idaho, uses a technology known as network virtualization to inexpensively allow retail service providers to compete for users and provide innovative services over a public network without any requirement for new hardware at the customer’s home or business. Among other novelties, Ammon allows users to instantly switch between services, receive more than one service at a time, and inexpensively create private sub-networks. Under network virtualization, functions previously performed by specialized hardware devices are instead performed by software. In the United States, such technology is most often used by private telecommunications companies in ways that reduce internal costs but leave those companies controlling all services over their networks. Ammon’s technology strategy—along with other aspects of Ammon’s financing and operational model—provides competition and innovation. Other models include building public "dark" (or unused) fiber for use by private entities, and using virtualization in a more limited way

Artificial Intelligence, Content Moderation, and Freedom of Expression

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