Platform Governance in Canada: Essay Series

Disinformation is not just a content problem; it is entangled with the broader issues around platform governance. In order to address the problem of disinformation, the Canadian government needs to implement a broad platform governance agenda that at its core holds platforms accountable for the design, incentives, and operations of their services. Disinformation is a governance problem that requires a new framework to address the many aspects of this problem that go beyond individual posts.

Our goal is for this project to serve as the foundation in developing the platform governance policy agenda in Canada, to hold platforms accountable for their systems, and to build public awareness of this policy agenda.

The project applies an award-winning framework for understanding and implementing global platform governance developed by Nanjala Nyabola, Taylor Owen, and Heidi Tworek in 2021-22 to the Canadian context. Our aim is to take the tested global framework on platform governance and now apply it to the Canadian context.

Our framework showed that a problem like disinformation can only be understood as interlinked with four domains of platform governance: content, data, competition, and infrastructure. We apply these four domains to the Canadian context by bringing together a group of leading Canadian scholars.

This systemic approach is vital to address the range of problems caused by disinformation and to identify the full suite of possible solutions. It will ensure that the knowledge on these policy domains present in the academic community is brought into the policy-making process and public discourse.