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Amongst the many debates within the sphere of platform governance, one is particularly telling of the political stakes at play: how should journalistic content be treated in relation to content regulation? There is, perhaps, no better case in which this is playing out than the upcoming Digital Services Act proposed by the European Commission. Specifically, on the one hand, news media organisations have been lobbying for a ‘non-interference principle’ that would prevent platforms from moderating editorial content that has been published by credible news sources, while on the other hand, officials, platforms, and civil society experts have been arguing against such a measure, primarily, due to the risk of creating an exploitable loophole for bad actors. This paper aims to unravel the contentious negotiations behind this debate. This article draws from more than a dozen of in-depth interviews with relevant stakeholders. Finally, this paper aspires to help inform the multifaceted conundrum of who governs the contemporary digital public sphere, to further expose the risks of entrusting this task solely to social media platforms and, last, to contribute to a much-needed theorisation and reconsideration of news media’s role in platform governance.

The article discusses the debates surrounding the treatment of journalistic content in relation to content regulation in the context of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). News media organisations lobbied for a privileged treatment of editorial content from platforms’ content moderation systems during the DSA’s negotiations in the European Parliament, which came to be known as “non-interference principle”. Although the principle did not make it to the final version of DSA, a provision related to the respect of media pluralism and media freedom by platforms was added. This article draws data from in-depth interviews with stakeholders, as well as from an analysis of legal and communication documents. It aspires to shed light on the political-economic tensions that shaped the final version of DSA and how the EU attempted to integrate the asymmetric relationship between news media and platforms in its regulatory agenda.

A dataset containing DNI and FJP participants from 2017-2022 that is meant to be published alongside an academic article.

CovidCheck is the third monitoring report that has been commissioned by the BAI and prepared by the DCU Institute for Future Media, Democracy and Society (FuJo), on the implementation of the Code in Ireland. Each of these reports has been part of a larger monitoring process undertaken by European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services (ERGA), at the request of the EU Commission. As with the first two reports, the authors of CovidCheck conclude that, while the Code is a significant first step in fighting disinformation, significant weaknesses in terms of structure, content and enforcement remain to be addressed. This conclusion also underpins the guidance issued by the EU Commission in May 2021 on how the Code should be strengthened by the signatories to become a more effective tool in fighting disinformation.

This article proposes to start considering the role that citizens play in platform governance as a way of critically reflecting on issues of inclusivity in and effectiveness of current decision-making processes. This article attempts to apply the above suggestion by studying citizens’ discourse in recent European efforts to regulate online content. It does so by employing an experimental methodology, namely, a computationally assisted Critical Discourse Analysis on textual data derived from citizens’ contributions to the European Commission’s Public Consultations on three crucial regulatory texts: the Code of Practice on Disinformation, the Recommendation on Tackling Illegal Content Online and the Digital Services Act. The present analysis suggests that the EU’s strategy to advance participatory governance through public consultations seems to ignore citizens’ qualitative input and, thus, the feedback received can be severely limited. Concluding, the article maintains that scholarship should adopt a more encompassing scope when studying platform governance, especially concerning citizen and user participation, beyond the traditional frame of participation through civil society representation, while critically scrutinising existing ostensibly participatory structures.