Tag: Supreme Court

Constitutional metaphors: Facebook’s “Supreme Court” and the Legitimation of Platform Governance

Josh Cowls

A range of rhetorical devices have been used to simplify the complexities associated with the governance of online platforms. This includes “constitutional metaphors”: metaphorical allusions to traditional political concepts such as statehood, democracy, and constitutionalism. Here, we empirically trace the ascent of a powerful constitutional metaphor currently employed in the news media discourse on platform governance: characterizations of Facebook’s Oversight Board (OB) as a “supreme court.”

I have a new paper published open access in New Media and Society with Philipp Darius, Dominiquo Santistevan and Moritz Schramm, about Facebook’s “Oversight Board” and the depiction of it as a “Supreme Court”.

What’s at the end of Facebook’s rainbow?

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(c) Philippa Willitts on Flickr
(c) Philippa Willitts on Flickr

In a talk I gave at the Data Power conference in Sheffield a couple of weeks ago, I posed the following thought experiment: what if Mark Zuckerberg woke up feeling like Rupert Murdoch? For decades it’s been accepted – if seldom celebrated – that Murdoch’s red-tops command serious influence over the British electorate. Not for nothing, then, is it said that ‘it was the Sun wot won it‘ for John Major’s Conservatives in 1992; similar arguments could be made for each general election since, not least the most recent one. Continue reading “What’s at the end of Facebook’s rainbow?” →