Important links

• Paper (preprint)
• Social Media + Society link
• Medium Blog that summarizes this paper
• Slides

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. Decentralization of power can arise horizontally, through parallel communities, each with local administration, and vertically, through multiple hierarchies of overlapping jurisdiction. Drawing from the literature on federalism and polycentricity on analogous offline institutions, we scrutinize the landscape of existing platforms through the lens of multi-level governance. Our analysis describes how online platforms incorporate varying forms and degrees of decentralized governance. In particular, we propose a framework that characterizes the general design space and the various ways that middle levels of governance vary in how they can interact with a centralized governance system above and end users below. This focus provides a starting point for new lines of inquiry between platform- and community-governance scholarship. By engaging themes of decentralization, hierarchy, power, and responsibility, while discussing concrete examples, we connect designers and theorists of online spaces.

BibTeX citation

@article{jhaver2023decentralizing,
    author = {Jhaver, Shagun and Frey, Seth, and Zhang, Amy X.}, 
    title = {Decentralizing Platform Power: A Design Space of Multi-level Governance in Online Social Platforms}, 
    year = {2023}, 
    journal = {Social Media + Society}, 
    numpages = {10}, 
    }