Enhanced self-regulation: The case of Facebook's content governance

Content regulation on digital platforms has become a contested issue on the public and scholarly agendas. To understand how digital platform providers experiment with making commitments regarding their regulation, this article process-traces Facebook's content regulation to ask how it self-regulates despite constant pressures for policy intervention. The first part of the article shows how Facebook moved from its initial "thin" self-regulatory regime toward what I call "enhanced self-regulation," which relies on first-party and independent third-party intermediaries. Thereafter, I show how Facebook self-regulated the balance between public and private interests over time and across the regimes. The findings suggest that powerful actors such as Facebook can innovate in self-regulation by reallocating content-related responsibilities to intermediaries and subsequently create polycentric governance regimes. Lessons about how self-regulators that face public criticism can make more credible commitments to public interests are then drawn from the strengths and weakness of enhanced self-regulation.