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This article examines the cultural production of ageing in China. Specifically, it studies the representation and cultural construction of ageing on Red (xiao hongshu), a popular e-commerce orientated social media application (app). By noting the local in-app and techno-political dynamics the ageing discourse operates in, this article argues that the representation of ageing on Red reflects Chinese platform's dual ambitions of pursuing market success and securing political support from the party-state. Drawing on data collected from a mixed-method approach of platform and document analysis, it finds that Red's representation of ageing is located within the state's official discourse that shifts the caring responsibility and duty to younger family members. By governing the ageing body, the Chinese government is also governing the general population. This article advances knowledge of digital media use in producing cultural discourses around their role in shaping biopolitical governance in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

YouTube's "up next" feature algorithmically selects, suggests, and displays videos to watch after the one that is currently playing. This feature has been criticized for limiting users' exposure to a range of diverse media content and information sources; meanwhile, YouTube has reported that they have implemented various technical and policy changes to address these concerns. However, there is little publicly available data to support either the existing concerns or YouTube's claims of having addressed them. Drawing on the idea of "platform observability," this article combines computational and qualitative methods to investigate the types of content that the algorithms underpinning YouTube's "up next" feature amplify over time, using three keyword search terms associated with sociocultural issues where concerns have been raised about YouTube's role: "coronavirus," "feminism," and "beauty." Over six weeks, we collected the videos (and their metadata, including channel IDs) that were highly ranked in the search results for each keyword, as well as the highly ranked recommendations associated with the videos. We repeated this exercise for three steps in the recommendation chain and then examined patterns in the recommended videos (and the channels that uploaded the videos) for each query and their variation over time. We found evidence of YouTube's stated efforts to boost "authoritative" media outlets, but at the same time, misleading and controversial content continues to be recommended. We also found that while algorithmic recommendations offer diversity in videos over time, there are clear "winners" at the channel level that are given a visibility boost in YouTube's "up next" feature. However, these impacts are attenuated differently depending on the nature of the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to discuss the impact of the expansion of the country of origin principle to video-sharing digital platforms, and how this contributes to a new paradigm of centralized governance of online media content in Europe. Compared to other jurisdictional regimes in the fields of data protection, intellectual property and personality rights, where other country of receipt and targeting tests are utilized, the case of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) demonstrates the emergence of a split governance model between individual rights and public interests, which fails to protect adequately local cultural and social specificities in the media sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The May 2023 version of Brazil's Fake News Bill (FNB), a proposed new statutory framework for social media regulation, heavily referenced the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). The literature on regulatory convergence points to the Brussels Effect , praising the EU for wielding unilateral soft power in shaping global regulations. Therefore, based on interviews with Brazilian experts who played a significant role in the regulatory discussion, this study applies Thematic Analysis to assess the DSA's impact on the FNB draft. The article finds limited Brussels Effect due to criticism of its incapacity to address local platform liability concerns and the absence of economic and legal drivers for convergence with EU regulation. Despite this, the study highlights the DSA's positive influence on the local debate in promoting democratic and human rights principles, leveraging the European legislative process to enrich local discussions. Finally, local political factors contributed to a narrative that differed from the DSA, framing the FNB not only as a tool against disinformation, but also as a means to protect democracy. This paper offers an unprecedented case study of the Brussels Effect reach on the global-south, presenting limitations of the EU benchmark when transposed to other regulatory and political contexts. • Two key political factors influenced the FNB's draft. • The DSA serves as a symbolic reference in Brazil's Fake News Bill debate. • The Brussels Effect is limited due to the DSA's incapacity to address local issues. • We identified the lack of economic drivers imposing convergence with the DSA. • The paper offers a case study of the Brussels Effect from a global-south perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tourism Tribune / Lvyou Xuekan is the property of Tourism Institute of Beijing Union University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article proposes to consider the COVID-19 global pandemic as new major development for cultural industries and policies and to highlight timely and crucial trends due to the lockdown measures. Thus, it attempts to stimulate the scholarship debate regarding the consequences of the pandemic to the action of global online platforms, as well as to policy and economic aspects of cultural sectors. Taking as case study the audio-visual sector, the article explores whether the US global streaming platforms are the winning players of the lockdown measures and emphasizes the multifaceted strategies developed by US-based platforms in order to strengthen their soft power. Focusing on China and the European Union, the article also argues that the overwhelming action of US-based online platforms triggers the potential emergence of media platform regionalization in the context of COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, it highlights the regulatory challenges and how the new empirical trends are expected to shape the current audio-visual policy framework. The analysis focuses on the period between the beginning of global pandemic in Asia-Pacific in January 2020 and the progressive easing of lockdown measures in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific in July 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Policy & Internet is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the rise of TikTok in three aspects: globalization strategies, data and content policies, and geopolitical implications. Instead of focusing on app features and uses within the platform proper, we situate and critically analyse TikTok as a platform business in a global media policy and governance context. We first unpack TikTok's platformization process, tracing how TikTok gradually diversifies its business models and platform affordances to serve multisided markets. To understand TikTok's platform governance, we systematically analyse and compare its data and content policies for different regions. Crucial to its global expansion, we then look at TikTok's lobbying efforts to maintain government relations and corporate responses after facing multiple regulatory probing by various national governments. TikTok's case epitomizes problems and challenges faced by a slew of globalizing Chinese digital platforms in increasingly contested geopolitics that cut across the chasms and fault lines between the rise of China and India as emergent powers in the US-dominated global platform ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies a 'policy turn' in questions of internet governance, as politicians and policy-makers across multiple jurisdictions grapple with the power of digital platforms, and associated questions of accountability, transparency, market dominance and content regulation. The EU Hate Speech monitoring code, the Christchurch Call, the UK Online Harms Bill and Australia's ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry are manifestations of this trend, in what Philip Schlesinger has described as an emergent 'regulatory field'. While corporate self-regulation has tended to be the dominant framework for digital sectors, there is growing pressure on the part of nation states for greater external regulation. In this article, we will consider different conceptual premises for understanding platform power, arising from neo-pluralist, class and elite theories, as well as the relative significance of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), nation state governments, corporate self-regulation (e.g. Facebook Oversight Board) and supranational governance mechanisms, such as Tim Berners-Lee's proposed 'Contract for the Web'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike many other countries around the world, the United States has taken relatively little substantive action in the realm of platform governance, despite the United States being directly impacted by occurrences such as Russian interference in the 2016 election, domestic disinformation related to the 2020 election, the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal and the 'infodemic' of misinformation that has accompanied the Coronavirus pandemic. Yet the past four years have involved numerous Congressional hearings on various aspects of platform governance and a multitude of bills have been introduced addressing a similarly wide range of platform governance issues. With so many indicators of potential government action over the past half-decade, but so few actual policy interventions, platform governance appears to be a prime example of a policy-making context in which symbolic actions are taking precedence over substantive actions. This article illustrates this dynamic through an analysis of recent platform governance developments in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dedicated complementors are devoted, faithful, and willing to invest in their partnership with a platform owner. Since such complementors promise continuous value co-creation, complementor dedication is an essential objective of platform governance. However, as dedicated complementors also increase their vulnerability vis-à-vis the platform owner, platform governance needs to strike a balance between satisfying global ecosystem needs and the local partnership needs. To understand this challenge better, our study develops six hypotheses on how two fundamental governance mechanisms – i.e., rules and the way in which these rules are practised – independently and symbiotically drive complementor dedication. We test these hypotheses using survey data from 181 complementors. Our findings show that complementors become more dedicated to a platform owner, the more adequate they perceive the rules to be. Furthermore, our findings suggest two sensible strategies to actualise the potential of adequate rules. Platform owners should either refrain entirely from practising rules with situational flexibility and benevolence, thereby achieving moderate complementor dedication. Alternatively, they should practice rules with both flexibility and benevolence at the same time, thereby maximising complementor dedication. Our findings contribute to the literature on platform governance and broader governance literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of recent controversies surrounding the censorship of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer online content, specifically on YouTube and Tumblr, we interrogate the relationship between normative understandings of sexual citizenship and the content classification regimes. We argue that these content classification systems and the platforms' responses to public criticism both operate as norm-producing technologies, in which the complexities of sexuality and desire are obscured in order to cultivate notions of a 'good' lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer sexual citizen. However, despite normative work of classification seeking to distinguish between sexuality and sex, we argue that the high-profile failures of these classification systems create the conditions for users to draw attention to, rather than firm, these messy boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the rise of blockchain technology has led to the emergence of a growing number of decentralized platforms that are governed less by platform owners and more through community efforts. The emergence of blockchain platforms offers a unique opportunity to examine alternative structures for platform governance and to develop a theory around the value of centralized, semi-decentralized, and decentralized governance. Drawing on mechanism design theory, we evaluate the tradeoffs between centralization and decentralization and hypothesize semi-decentralization as a higher performing governance structure. Empirical evidence from the blockchain industry shows that decentralization has an inverted U-shaped relationship with platforms' market capitalization, developer attention, and development activity. We further examine factors driving the decentralization of platform governance and find that digital platforms of the infrastructure layer—relative to those of the application layer—have a tendency to become more decentralized. This tendency, nevertheless, can be offset by experienced leaders to achieve semi-decentralization. Overall, this study contributes new insights on the characteristics, antecedents, and consequences of effective platform governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Platform companies use design changes to govern their participants. The success of a design change depends on participants' responses, which are influenced by their local environments. Our study focuses on an important aspect of the local environment—rural versus urban. Using data from a leading e‐commerce platform, we find that relative to urban sellers, rural sellers were particularly poor at adjusting to a major design change, resulting in a persistent performance gap. We attribute these misaligned responses to rural sellers' lack of local access to rich information. This study shows that sellers' local heterogeneity generates equivocal responses and carries unintended consequences for platform governance. It also enriches our understanding of digital inequality and algorithmic design by highlighting the importance of the "offline interface." Managerial Summary: Digital platforms frequently change their design rules (e.g., ranking algorithms) to guide the behavior of participants. However, participants are inherently heterogeneous, and their abilities to understand and follow a design change also vary across populations. This study examines a major design change on a leading e‐commerce platform. We find that, compared to urban sellers, rural sellers developed responses that detracted from the platform's design goals and resulted in lower sales. This study highlights the need for digital platforms to understand how participants' offline environments affect their online behavior. This study also shapes the conversation on digital inequality: despite being connected online, entrepreneurs in traditionally disadvantaged regions may still suffer from a lack of accessible local information channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we undertake a stakeholder analysis of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Digital Platforms Inquiry to understand the nature and influence of different forms of public input. Our findings show that nation-state regulation of digital platforms is now very much on the policy agenda worldwide, with a focus upon the competition policy dimensions of platform regulation. The second key finding is that the regulatory activism of the ACCC have ensured that the Inquiry and its findings have had maximum public impact. Finally, we argue that the key dynamic shaping the Inquiry was the competing demands of the traditional news media publishers and digital platforms, and that civil society input was relatively limited and secondary to the final recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content moderation was already a highly polarized policy topic before the COVID-19 pandemic. The subsequent onslaught of misinformation and disinformation on COVID-19 has also led to multiple platform policy responses by private US-based companies and beyond. Discussion of these policies has also contributed to a sense that this level of media attention to a formerly somewhat obscure US law – Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – could lead to a change in that law. This commentary provides a look into this small piece of legislation that has historically had a big impact on western internet governance. This is framed within a more global view of internet governance, and the impact this may have on the internet more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's digital platforms occupy sites of growing strategic significance in the daily lives of cities. Acting as infrastructures of urban exchange, platform services institute basic match-making capabilities between mobile subjects, whether for transportation, shopping, accommodation, dating, or, simply, public discourse. As is increasingly recognized, the nature of value exchange traded via these platforms extends beyond their immediate domain of service provision, whether transportation or accommodation, for example, to wider “data ecosystems” of users, producers, and consumers. It is the conditions instituted by platform services to govern data ecosystems that are the focus of this article and are, I argue, of critical importance to how big data can be leveraged in ways that expand new frontiers of urban science and more broadly, urban sustainability policy. The rise in platform urbanism means that urban big data are not simply as a diagnostic tool for monitoring and evaluating complex urban behaviors but can be co-opted in ways that actively engineers the scaling of data-driven platform services and their myriad codependencies. These conditions present significant challenges not only to informational policy but increasingly also to urban governance settings, where platform-mediated interactions facilitate powerful but unevenly shared territories of urban intelligence.

This article is concerned with identifying the ideological and techno-material parameters that inform Facebook's approach to racism and racist contents. The analysis aims to contribute to studies of digital racism by showing Facebook's ideological position on racism and identifying its implications. To understand Facebook's approach to racism, the article deconstructs its governance structures, locating racism as a sub-category of hate speech. The key findings show that Facebook adopts a post-racial, race-blind approach that does not consider history and material differences, while its main focus is on enforcement, data, and efficiency. In making sense of these findings, we argue that Facebook's content governance turns hate speech from a question of ethics, politics, and justice into a technical and logistical problem. Secondly, it socializes users into developing behaviors/contents that adapt to race-blindness, leading to the circulation of a kind of flexible racism. Finally, it spreads this approach from Silicon Valley to the rest of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has embarked on a radical transformation of its online and mobile games industry since its government announced its ambition to be a global sporting power. This study investigates Chinese electronic sports (eSports) in the context of platform governance and platform capitalism, through a case study of the platformization of Tencent, one of China's largest media conglomerates. We employ a boundary analysis of platform documentation, a document analysis of policies, financial data, and ethnographic interviews to examine the interactivity and flow of power arising from direct state control and the processes of commercialization and professionalization. To support our proposal that the state and corporations, while genetically different, are mutually constitutive, we explore concepts of the platformization of infrastructures and infrastructuralization of platforms. This study proposes that the Chinese eSports industry has an umbrella-like structure and challenges the assumption that China is an authoritarian system with a one-size-fits-all policy. Our results imply that games industry professionals invite funding bodies to work jointly with government to develop alternatives for the eSports industry. Meanwhile, we show how Tencent utilizes its expansion of capital fluidity and data-driven multidimensionality, moving toward an ecosystem of platform dependency, organizational homogenization, and deep power asymmetries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complementary products and services of third-party complementors have become one of the cornerstones for the success and sustainability of digital platforms. To understand how and why these complementors and their complements decide to contribute to digital platforms, Information Systems (IS) research has paid considerable attention to the effects of control modes on shaping platform governance. However, there is still a lack of understanding of the causal effects of a widely applied, yet under-examined control mode, namely input control (i.e. the set of mechanisms that screen and sort out complementors and their complements before entering the digital platform's ecosystem). In particular, extant literature has largely ignored the distinction between complementor-related and complement-related input control. Using a sequential mixed-methods approach, this paper first provides results of a quantitative study from a survey with 114 web-browser extension developers to investigate hypothesised relationships, then provides a qualitative study based on semi-structured interviews with 22 developers to confirm and complement the formerly found relationships. Both studies provide consistent support for the assertion that both complementor-related and complement-related input control negatively affects complementors' continuance intentions and that perceived usefulness and satisfaction mediate these effects. As such, our paper contributes to IS governance research primarily by (1) conceptually distinguishing between complementor-related and complement-related input control and (2) uncovering their distinct effects on critical complementor beliefs, attitudes and behavioural intentions. Moreover, our paper offers insights that can help platform providers to effectively manage their screening and gatekeeping processes for the success and sustainability of their digital platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do digital platforms govern their users? Existing studies, with their focus on impersonal and procedural modes of governance, have largely neglected to examine the human labor through which platform companies attempt to elicit the consent of their users. This study describes the relationship labor that is systematically excised from many platforms' accounts of what they do and missing from much of the scholarship on platform governance. Relationship labor is carried out by agents of platform companies who engage in interpersonal communications with a platform's users in an effort to align diverse users' activities and preferences with the company's interests. The authors draw on ethnographic research conducted at AllDone (a for-profit startup that built an online market for local services) and edX (a non-profit startup that partnered with institutions to offer Massive Open Online Courses). The findings leverage variation in organizational contexts to elaborate the common practices and divergent strategies of relationship labor deployed by each platform. Both platforms relied on relationship workers to engage in account management practices aimed at addressing the particular concerns of individual users through interpersonal communications. Relationship workers in each setting also engaged in community management practices that facilitated contact and collaboration among users in pursuit of shared goals. However, our findings show that the relative frequency of relationship workers' use of account management and community management practices varies with organizational conditions. This difference in strategies also corresponded to different ways of valuing relationship workers and incorporating them into organizational processes. The article demonstrates how variation in organizational context accounts for divergent strategies for governing user participation in digital platforms and for the particular processes through which governance is accomplished and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Platform firms' success depends on complementary innovation. This paper studies the relation between opportunities for interfirm exchange and complementary innovation. An empirical study of a sample of app developer firms attending Apple's 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference suggests three findings. First, the opportunity to exchange stimulated innovation in the form of major app updates that received positive consumer feedback. Second, the effects were more pronounced for older and larger firms, potentially because these firms have more experience and resources to leverage exchanges and safeguard against knowledge spillovers. Third, part of the effects may be attributed to learning and collaborations. This paper was accepted by Anandhi Bharadwaj, information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital platforms elude legal and regulatory frameworks traditionally used to address market power, speech and disinformation issues. One of the dominant policy responses to addressing these issues involves reforming competition policy to better manage digital platform markets. This case study examines how stakeholders, including tech giants, their competitors, regulators and advocacy groups, deploy competition policy to address platform power in a series of 2019–20 US congressional hearings on the subject, with implications for the wider global debate. The article traces the politics underlying these debates, which manifests in variations in stakeholders' definitions of platform power and their proposed solutions, reflecting tensions over the role of the state in managing markets and in addressing non-economic concerns associated with digital platforms. The article concludes with a consideration of what this politics implies for policy interventions aimed at addressing platform power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economist Dani Rodrik argues that global economic governance is characterized by a trilemma: 'we cannot have hyperglobalization, democracy, and national self-determination all at once. We can have at most two out of three'. This trilemma can also be applied to internet governance and global platform governance as a corollary global internet-governance impossibility theorem. This trilemma, which emphasizes who sets the rules and the degree of democratic accountability they face, offers us a way to evaluate online content-regulation proposals. This article applies this framework to four prominent platform-governance proposals: Facebook's proposal for a global 'Oversight Board'; David Kaye's book Speech Police; the United Kingdom's Online Harms White Paper; and French president Emmanuel Macron's speech to the 2018 Internet Governance Forum. Of the four, only Macron's framework offers a pathway to reconciling democratic accountability with the existence of different legitimate views on how content should be regulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multisided platforms such as Apple's App Store and Valve's Steam become increasingly dominant when more end users and complement producers join their ecosystems. Despite their importance to a platform's overall success, however, we know little about complement producers and how they are affected by a platform's dominance trajectory: How does a platform's increasingly dominant market position affect performance outcomes for complementors? We explore this question by conducting a multiple case study on four market leading platform ecosystems over several years. We discover that, as a platform becomes increasingly dominant, the platform sponsor's governance strategies shift from being largely supportive of the wider complement population to becoming more selective and geared toward end users. These changes are associated with shifts in complementor performance outcomes. Although the value created at the overall ecosystem level increases as a platform gains dominance, average demand for individual complements decreases and becomes progressively concentrated. Furthermore, we find that prices for complements decline, whereas the costs complementors incur increase. These findings are particularly salient in the context of digital platform ecosystems, where platform sponsors can seamlessly alter their technological infrastructures and implement changes to extend and solidify their dominant positions.AMD Data Visualization AMD Data Visualization: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of civil society in shaping content moderation governance arrangements in the United States. Drawing on prior research that recognizes the importance of civil society in shaping policy, this article analyzes the experiences of civil society practitioners engaged in content moderation activism. Based on in-depth original interviews with civil society practitioners, I demonstrate how civil society's activity in this space aligns with known regulatory standard-setting process competencies and suggest advocacy work benefits from the power of coalition lobbying and social capital. Moreover, I highlight the sense of frustration from some practitioners that they are not compensated by firms for their monitoring and reporting work that improves platforms' products, and I offer preliminary reasons for why practitioners contest moderation norms. The paper's insights contribute to the study of platform governance by illuminating informal mechanisms utilized by civil society, which holds broader implications for understanding the dynamics of non-state actors in shaping online platforms and their policies. • New empirical evidence contributes insight into the experiences of U.S. civil society actors involved in platform governance. • U.S. civil society practitioners engage in content moderation activism via known regulatory competencies. • Informal mechanisms such as networks, coalitions, and knowledge sharing are used to contest digital governance arrangements. • The power of coalition lobbying, dynamics of civil society-platform interactions, and motives for contestation are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how the technical infrastructure of social media platforms, particularly personalization algorithms, enables filter bubbles to emerge. It identifies several possible explanations, namely that platform owners intend this outcome; that the relevant algorithms contain inherent biases; and that user actions amplify the effect of these algorithms. While the true answer cannot be ascertained, the article concludes by outlining important areas for future research and highlighting the implications of social media content personalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sharing economy has transformed economic transactions, created new organizational forms, and contributed to changes in consumer culture. Started as a movement with promises of a more sustainable, democratic, and inclusive economy, the sharing economy, and its impact on issues such as privacy, discrimination, worker rights, and regulation, is now the subject of heated debate. Many of these issues root in the changes that digital technologies have brought and the unresolved moral and ethical questions emerging therefrom. This special issue contributes to this ongoing debate with five articles that develop theoretical frameworks and conduct empirical investigations, providing fine-grained analyses of urgent issues in the sharing economy. In this article, we highlight these and other issues that we believe deserve further attention from business ethics scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a host of high-profile scandals, the political influence of platform companies (the global corporations that that operate online 'platforms' such as Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and many other online services) is slowly being re-evaluated. Amidst growing calls to regulate these companies and make them more democratically accountable, and a host of policy interventions that are actively being pursued in Europe and beyond, a better understanding of how platform practices, policies, and affordances (in effect, how platforms govern) interact with the external political forces trying to shape those practices and policies is needed. Building on digital media and communication scholarship as well as governance literature from political science and international relations, the aim of this article is to map an interdisciplinary research agenda for platform governance, a concept intended to capture the layers of governance relationships structuring interactions between key parties in today's platform society, including platform companies, users, advertisers, governments, and other political actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article identifies the current global 'techlash' towards the major digital and social media platforms as providing the context for a renewed debate about whether these digital platform companies are effectively media companies (publishers and broadcasters of media content), and implications this has for twenty-first-century media policy. It identifies content moderation as a critical site around which such debates are being played out, and considers the challenges arising as national and regionally based regulatory options are considered for digital platforms that are 'born global'. It considers the shifting balance between the 'social contract' of public interest obligations and democratic rights of free speech and freedom of expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]