ADM Talk: The Turn to Automation in Platform Governance

Abstract

Social media platforms are turning to automation and "AI" to tackle their hardest challenges: the moderation and regulation of controversial and harmful content on their services.  Copyright, hate speech and misinformation – technological solutions to difficult platform governance puzzles are mobilised by all major platforms by now. This talk will describe and contextualise this turn by positioning it within the longstanding motif of the “technological fix”. In consequence, this turn is not mere a functional development of technological progress, but a multi-layered turn including technical, discursive and political phenomena.

The talk identifies a discursive turn to responsibility in platform governance as a key driver for AI and automation. In addition, a political turn to more demanding liability rules for platforms further incentivizes platforms to automatically screen their content for possibly infringing or violating content, and to position AI as a solution to complex social problems. This conceptual argument will be complemented by an overview into the deployment of automated systems in content moderation by social media platforms, and a discussion of the inherent political implications.

Bio

Christian Katzenbach is a Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Bremen and Head of the Lab "Platform Governance, Media, and Technology". In various international projects, he investigates the formation of platforms and their governance, the discursive and political shaping of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) and the increasing automation of communication. Christian is an associated researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) where he was a founding member.