Robyn Caplan - Reassembling the Social Media: How to Study Platforms

Name: Robyn Caplan - Reassembling the Social Media: How to Study Platforms — DIGS Lab
Start: 2022-03-28T18:00:00-0400
End: 2022-03-28T19:00:00-0400

Monday, March 28, 2022
6:00 PM 7:00 PM 18:00 19:00

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In this talk, Robyn Caplan explores how we investigate platform companies within the context of content moderation.

About this event

We spend so much time on social media, yet how much do we really know about companies currently undergirding so much of the public sphere? In this talk, Robyn Caplan, Senior Researcher at Data & Society Research Institute, explores how we investigate platform companies – as organizations and as technologies – within the context of content moderation. Together, we will examine some of the challenges of studying platforms, and what methods – such as access to these companies – can and cannot tell us about how they develop their products, policies, and practices. We will examine this in the context of the areas of platform governance and tech policy more generally, to understand how this burgeoning field is both trying to study and shape platform policies simultaneously.

Robyn Caplan is a Senior Researcher at Data & Society Research Institute and a founding member of the Platform Governance Research Network. She received her PhD from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. She conducts research at the intersection of platform governance and media policy. Her research examines the impact of inter-and-intra-organizational behavior on platform governance and content moderation.

Caplan’s work has been published in journals such as Social Media + Society, First Monday, Big Data & Society, and Feminist Media Studies. Her work has been featured by publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired, NBC, and Al Jazeera. She has conducted research on a variety of issues regarding data-centric technological development including government data policies, media manipulation, and the use of data in policing.

This event is co-hosted by Concordia’s Machine Agencies group at the Milieux Institute, the Digital Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality Lab, the Department of Communication Studies, and McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy and the Max Bell School of Public Policy.