The Role of Media Coverage in Platform Policy Change

• In Event: News Coverage and Its Effects

Abstract

Through their privatized systems of governance, social media platforms play an increasingly central role in shaping online speech and culture. Platforms’ extensive policies, standards, and rules are not fixed, but subject to frequent and often dramatic changes. Scholars have suggested that these changes in policy are responsive to pressures from external stakeholders, including journalists and government actors. To this day, however, no study has systematically analyzed to what extent and
under which circumstances media coverage compels platform policy change. Drawing on data collected from mainstream news outlets between 2004-2021 and on a novel dataset of policy documents from the Platform Governance Archive (PGA),in this paper we address this gap by analyzing how news coverage of four major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube) evolved over time, and to what extent negative news coverage drove changes to these platforms’ user policies. Preliminary findings suggest that the tone of media coverage of social media coarsened over time, especially with respect to platforms' policies and processes.

Authors

• Nahema Marchal, University of Zurich

• Emma Hoes, Zurich University

• Christian Katzenbach, University of Bremen

• K. Jonathan Klüser, University of Zürich

• Maël Dominique Kubli, University of Zurich