Recent developments in platform governance have empowered regulators to require platforms to take down harmful and unlawful content such as the live streaming of violence and child sexual abuse material. However, platform responsibility for content that is health-demoting but not criminal or violent has been relatively neglected. This paper focuses on how platforms create advertising environments that promote unhealthy diets, which we label an ‘algorithmic determinant of health’. We propose a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to digital platform regulation that would require both governments and platforms to protect individuals from health demoting flows of food marketing content online. We use our HRBA to review the policies of twelve major advertiser-funded digital platforms regarding food marketing. We conclude they do not comply with platforms’ human rights obligations. Accordingly, governments should regulate platforms’ online advertising. We argue that initiatives like the UK Online Safety Act are too narrow for this purpose, and that the imposition of a digital duty of care on platforms, such as seen in the EU Digital Services Act, is a more promising step. While applied to food marketing in this paper, our HRBA is relevant to other health demoting marketing content online such as gambling and alcohol.
The European Union has produced the world's first comprehensive regulation on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The two main regulatory instruments mobilised by the EU are the binding 2024 AI Act and the voluntary General-Purpose AI (GPAI) Code of Practice, a combination that reflects a structural tension between the regulatory oversight exercised by EU regulators and the growing role of technology platforms as co-stewards of regulation. Drawing on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, understood as shared visions of desirable futures and risks to be avoided, we ask: What sociotechnical imaginaries are embedded in the EU’s approach to AI? To explore this question, we empirically compare the imaginaries embedded in the 2024 AI Act, the 2025 GPAI Code of Practice and the preceding 2019 High Level Expert Group on AI report ‘Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI’ as a window to trace the imaginaries upon which the EU has built its approach to AI. We examine how the EU articulates the promises and risks of AI, which actors are legitimised to govern safety, what solutions are promoted, and what type of regulatory leadership emerges. We show how responsibilities are distributed between EU institutions and Big Tech, highlight the risks of regulatory capture, technosolutionism, and reliance on private infrastructure, and point towards democratic alternatives.
Online platform compliance with digital regulation is often framed as a question of effectiveness: whether rules are sufficiently or insufficiently implemented. This paper argues that such a perspective is insufficient for understanding contemporary platform governance. It introduces a new understanding of compliance and develops the concept of ‘strategic compliance narratives’. The goal is to capture how designated platforms adapt different regulatory requirements in ways that merely satisfy formal obligations, while also influencing user experience, regulatory legitimacy, and public trust. Based on the theory of legal endogeneity and examples from large online platforms’ responses to EU platform regulation it identifies three types of strategic compliance narratives: performative compliance, malicious compliance, and ideological defiance. In doing so, it shifts the focus from whether platforms comply, to how compliance can be enacted. It concludes by outlining policy recommendations to address these strategic dimensions of legal compliance.
Until recently, environmental harms were largely absent from internet governance discussions and their study. This article offers an analyses of how the environmental impact of internet infrastructure is discussed within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) arguing that sustainability becomes a justification regime for the internet's continued existence and growth in a world in crisis. Taking a discard studies approach, I explore what is and what must be discarded for the internet to continue to operate through a thematic analysis of 26 position papers submitted to the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) e-impact workshop. These insights allow me to expand on Liboiron’s (2014, 2021) concept of scalar mismatch to illuminate how limits to growth are directly at odds with the values that have shaped the internet. The internet governance community has not come to grips with the idea that the network is an environmental problem in itself; rather, a belief in growth, abundance of natural resources, and sustainability through innovation shapes their understanding of sustainability. This paper straddles infrastructure studies, internet governance studies, and environmental social sciences, showing how an environmental lens on infrastructure studies allows us to connect global governance debates with local conflict over resources.
How should digital political platforms be compared, and what kind of participation do they actually enable? This article proposes a three-dimensional framework for the study of online participation that brings into dialogue political sociology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies (STS). Rather than classifying platforms within broad normative families such as direct, deliberative, or liberal democracy, it analyses them along three axes: political governance, software affordances, and infrastructural dependencies. This framework makes it possible to assess not only how participation is formally organised, but also how it is encoded in interfaces and materially conditioned by servers. Empirically, the article draws on forty qualitative interviews conducted between 2019 and 2025 with developers, public officials, civic-tech professionals, activists, and NGO actors involved in the design or deployment of participatory platforms across Europe, Latin America, Africa, East Asia, and the United States. The framework is applied to four emblematic cases: Rousseau, Decidim, Consulta P & uacute;blica, and vTaiwan. The comparison shows that most platforms remain confined to reinforced forms of consultation, despite participatory rhetoric, because citizen power is limited either by top-down governance, constrained deliberative affordances, or strong infrastructural dependencies. Only Decidim approaches a more co-decisional, deliberative, and commons-oriented configuration, although even this project continues to rely on private cloud infrastructures.
