Regulating social media through self-regulation: a process-tracing case study of the European Commission and Facebook

Abstract

ABSTRACT Digital campaigns are an increasingly important facet of political campaigning. As a consequence, calls to regulate online political advertising have become louder. Yet, how digital campaigning and social media platforms should be regulated has been the subject of intense debate. In this paper, we combine a principal-agent perspective with a process-tracing methodology to examine the process of self-regulation of social media platforms. This developed mechanism is applied to the case of political advertisements on Facebook in the context of the 2019 European elections. We analyse the motivation of the European Commission to opt for self-regulation and explain the mismatch between the goals of the European Commission regarding online political campaigning on the one hand, and the deviating implementation of Facebook on the other hand. We find that both media-centric and politics-centric factors led the Commission to choose for self-regulation and identified how a combination of an incomplete contract and insufficient monitoring instruments prevented the Commission from tackling Facebook’s deviating policy with regard to online political advertisements.