About the Series: Platform Governance in Canada

Executive Summary

The internet has delivered enormous social, political, and economic benefits over the past 30 years, but its current phase — marked by the growth and consolidation of a few global platform companies over the past 15 years — has brought considerable costs, including election interference, harmful and hate speech, and mis- and disinformation. Governments worldwide have begun testing strategies to govern the digital public sphere, converging on what scholars call a platform governance agenda. In Canada, this activity spans bills such as C-11 (the Online Streaming Act) and C-18, a potential online safety bill, the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), and reforms to the Competition Act beginning with C-19, passed in June 2022.

Arguing that academic and policy discourse too often remains siloed by topic and disconnected from one another, Heidi Tworek and Taylor Owen introduce a set of 16 short pieces that apply to the Canadian context a global platform governance framework developed by Nanjala Nyabola, Taylor Owen, and Heidi Tworek in 2021-22. The framework organizes the field into four interlinked domains: content, data, competition, and infrastructure. Six briefs address content regulation — from social media influencers during elections and online harms to private messaging and chilling effects; further pieces treat data (AIDA, human-derived data, public/private definitions), competition (innovation, platform markets, scrutiny of Canadian firms like Shopify, on which only two peer-reviewed articles appear to exist), and infrastructure (generative AI, labour rights, geopolitics, and the environment).

Rather than proposing a single policy fix, the collection explores how these aspects of platform governance work together and can be advanced in unison, drawing out recommendations specific to Canada. The project was made possible in part by the Government of Canada, with a workshop hosted by the Internet Archive Canada in Vancouver in February 2023.