Important links

• arXiv link

Abstract

Many have criticized the centralized and unaccountable governance of prominent online social platforms, leading to renewed interest in platform governance that incorporates multiple centers of power. Decentralized power can arise horizontally, through parallel communities each with local administration, as well as vertically, through multiple levels of jurisdiction. Drawing from literature from organizational theory, federalism, and polycentricity on analogous offline institutions, we characterize the landscape of existing platforms through the lens of multi-level governance, allowing us to describe how a variety of platforms, including Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube, incorporate varying forms of decentralized governance. In particular, we outline a design space with 12 dimensions that characterizes how middle levels, or local governance units such as subreddits, Twitter blocklists, and YouTube channels, interact with one another and with a centralized governance system above and end users below. As not all aspects of offline institutions translate online, we discuss challenges unique to online governance and conclude with implications for decentralized governance design in online social platforms.

BibTeX citation

@article{jhaver:2022Designing,
  title={Decentralizing Platform Power: A Design Space of Multi-level Governance in Online Social Platforms},
  author={Jhaver, Shagun and Frey, Seth and Zhang, Amy},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.12529},
  year={2022}
}