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Controversies surrounding social media platforms have provided opportunities for institutional reflexivity amongst users and regulators on how to understand and govern platforms. Amidst contestation, platform companies have continued to enact projects that draw upon existing modes of privatized governance. We investigate how social media companies have attempted to achieve closure by continuing to set the terms around platform governance. We investigate two projects implemented by Facebook (Meta)-authenticity regulation and privacy controls-in response to the Russian Interference and Cambridge Analytica controversies surrounding the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Drawing on Goffman's metaphor of stage management, we analyze the techniques deployed by Facebook to reinforce a division between what is visible and invisible to the user experience. These platform governance projects propose to act upon front-stage data relations: information that users can see from other users-whether that is content that users can see from "bad actors", or information that other users can see about oneself. At the same time, these projects relegate back-stage data relations-information flows between users constituted by recommendation and targeted advertising systems-to invisibility and inaction. As such, Facebook renders the user experience actionable for governance, while foreclosing governance of back-stage data relations central to the economic value of the platform. As social media companies continue to perform platform governance projects following controversies, our paper invites reflection on the politics of these projects. By destabilizing the boundaries drawn by platform companies, we open space for continuous reflexivity on how platforms should be understood and governed., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The popularization of the Internet and the convenience of e-commerce are driving the online restaurant industry's rapid development of worldwide. However, serious information asymmetries in online food delivery (OFD) transactions not only aggravate food safety risks, resulting in simultaneous government and market failures, but also intensify consumers' perceived risks. This paper innovatively constructs a research framework for the governance participation willingness of OFD platform restaurants and consumers under the moderating effects of perceived risks from the perspective of control theory and then develops scales for analyzing the governance willingness of both restaurants and consumers. Using data collected through a survey, this paper explores the effect of control elements on governance participation by restaurants and consumers and analyzes the moderating effects of perceived food safety risks. Results showed that both government regulations and restaurant reputation (formal control elements) and online complaints and restaurant management response (informal control elements) can increase governance participation willingness among both platform restaurants and consumers. The moderating effects of perceived risks are partially significant. When the risks perceived by restaurants and consumers are strong, government regulation and online complaints can more effectively boost the governance participation willingness of restaurants and consumers, respectively. At this moment, consumers' willingness to pursue problem solving through online complaints is evidently enhanced. Accordingly, the perceived risks and the online complaints jointly motivate restaurants and consumers to participate in governance activities., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Dai, Qin and Wu.)

The positive and negative effects of the participation of digital platform companies in governance are a major issue of the times. Starting from the three subfields of internal governance, external governance, and co-governance, we construct an analytical framework for digital platform governance to understand the four-sided relationship among digital platform companies, the state, the market, and society. From the perspective of enterprise autonomy, we should view the effectiveness of platform company participation in social governance dialectically. The key of promoting good platform governance is to improve the external structural pressure from the state, promote the reform of the endogenous governance of enterprises, and build a sustainable architecture for co-governance. The mission of sociologists includes not only explanation but also intervention., Competing Interests: Competing interestsThe authors declare they have no competing interests., (© The Author(s) 2023.)

In response to the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, various developers turned to smartphone-based contact tracing to address the challenges of manual tracing. Due to the presence of network effects, i.e., the effectiveness of contact tracing applications increases with the number of users, information technology standards were critical to the technology's success. The standardization efforts in Europe led to a variety of trade-offs concerning the choice of an appropriate technological architecture due to the contradictory tensions resulting from the dualism between the need for contact tracing data to contain the pandemic and the need for data minimization to preserve user privacy. Drawing predominantly on the software platform and standards literature, we conduct an interpretive case study to examine the emergence and consequences of this multi-layered decision situation. Our findings reveal how Google and Apple were able to limit the individual leeway of external developers, thereby effectively resolving the European standards war. Furthermore, we identify and discuss the various short-term and long-term trade-offs associated with the standardization of contact tracing applications and translate our findings into recommendations for policy makers with respect to future crisis situations. Specifically, we propose a strategy grounded in our data that enables responsible actors to make goal-oriented and rapid decisions under time constraints., Competing Interests: Conflict of interestThe authors have no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article., (© The Author(s) 2022.)

In recent years, copyright governance for short videos has become a hot issue of common concern in the academic community and the industry. Therefore, this study intends to explore the economic aspect of copyright governance in relation to the proliferation of infringing short videos. The short video industry of China has been taken as a case to demonstrate the copyright governance issue. Transaction cost theory has been applied to analyze the economic aspect of copyright governance in terms of four dimensions: bounded rationality, opportunism, environmental uncertainty, and asset specificity. From the perspective of transaction cost economics, the problem of short video infringement is observed to be essentially a market failure due to high transaction costs. In the short video market, substantial transaction costs are incurred in the legal transaction of copyright with these costs considered to be too high. This is especially the case when transaction costs exceed the net proceeds initially expected by short video users from the authorization, making it impossible to carry out the transaction and leading to infringement. To effectively control the copyright infringement of short videos, it is necessary to build a cross-platform information-sharing mechanism to reduce search costs, establish a unified copyright management platform to reduce coordination costs, and give full attention to the role of technical support to reduce regulatory costs., Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Long.)

We are grateful to Professors Rebecca Reuber and Eileen Fischer for contributing our 2022 annual review article. This insightful review explores an issue of great contemporary importance regarding the relationship between entrepreneurial activities and social media platforms. Whilst there is much popular and media commentary regarding the opportunities such platforms offer for entrepreneurship, we lack informed, academic reflection upon the role and influence of such platforms for both good and ill. Hence, this review article is timely in identifying current practices and raising important issues for future research. Our thanks to the authors for their valuable contribution to the ISBJ. Entrepreneurs create digital platforms which, in turn, facilitate entrepreneurial behaviours of others, the platform users. An important start-up activity is developing the mechanisms to govern user participation. While prior literature has provided insights on the governance of innovation platforms and exchange platforms, it has shed little light on the governance of social media platforms. In this review, we synthesize the emerging literature on diverse social media platforms, focussing on four types of governance mechanisms: those that regulate user behaviour, those related to user identification and stature, those that structure relationships among users and those that direct user attention. We highlight the implications of this body of literature for entrepreneurship scholars., (© The Author(s) 2021.)

This study introduces a comprehensive overview of literature concerning the concepts of regulation and governance, and attempts to connect them to scholarly works that deal with the governance of and by social media platforms. The paper provides fundamental definitions of regulation and governance, along with a critique of polycentricity or multi-stakeholderism, in order to contextualise the discussion around platform governance and, subsequently, online content regulation. Moreover, where traditional governance literature conceptualised stakeholders as a triangle, this article proposes going beyond the triad of public, private and non-governmental actors, to account for previously invisible stakeholder clusters, like citizens and news media organisations. This paper also contends that, while platform governance is an important field of study and practice, the way it has been structured and investigated so far, is posing an existential risk to the broader internet governance structure, primarily, because of the danger of conflating the internet with platforms. As a result, there exists a timely need to reimagine the way in which we understand and study phenomena related to platform governance by adjusting our conceptual and analytical heuristics. So, this article wishes to expand the theorisation of this field in order to better engage with complicated platform governance issues, like the development of regulatory frameworks concerning online content regulation., Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed., (Copyright: © 2021 Papaevangelou C.)