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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• European Commission
• political advertisements
• digital campaigning
• regulatory governance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Only after relentless pressure from the EU institutions, Facebook agreed to make an exception for European political parties and EU institutions in the final weeks of the electoral campaign.

2 More specifically, the European Commission refers to Articles 114 and 224 TFEU as a legal basis for its legislative proposal.

3 Proposal for a Regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising (COM(2021)731_final). The proposal is currently being discussed by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers.

4 In total, five monthly reports were drafted from January until May 2019 (European Commission 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) (1294122N).