Freedom of expression issues on social media platforms may benefit from interdisciplinary research
Social media platforms impact users’ freedom of expression, for instance when they influence who can see what on their timelines, or when they remove certain content or promote other. Moreover, as the big tech companies have a strong market position and there are various barriers to entry to the social media markets, users have few alternatives to go to, and the switching is difficult. Better solutions to the current freedom of expression issues on social media could be found by combining the lenses of freedom of expression researchers and competition researchers, argues PhD candidate Maria Luisa Stasi of Tilburg Law School. She will defend her dissertation on December 19th, 2023 at Tilburg University.
Social media platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok impact users' freedom of expression rights by performing various activities to ‘curate’ the information that is presented to their users. They can select content, organize it, promote some content and demote other, etcetera. Usually, these activities are performed by automated systems, which are optimized for certain outcomes. In addition, these platforms can remove certain content and suspend accounts. There is very little or no transparency about how the content curation systems work, and what impact they have on the users' information diet and on the flow of information across communities and societies. On the other hand, the social media market is very concentrated, with a few giant players controlling the environment and making access for competitors very difficult.
In her PhD research, Maria Luisa Stasi started from the observation that these social media platforms’ behaviors are the focus of attention of two different communities of scholars: those interested in freedom of expression issues and those interested in competition issues.
However, cross-disciplinary dialogue among these two research communities is lacking, according to Stasi, and her research is an attempt to start filling this gap. Thus, she tried to look at the relevant social media behaviors using the lenses traditionally used by each of these communities.
Stasi argues that this approach could be useful to find solutions (remedies) that address both the freedom of expression challenges and the competition challenges raised by the behaviors of social media platforms.
PhD Defense
M.L. Stasi will defend her dissertation entitled Social media markets: A pro-competitive approach to free speech challenges on Tuesday December 19th, 2023, 1.30 PM at Tilburg University. Supervisors: Prof. G. Monti, Prof A. De Streel. The defense can be followed by a livestream.