Civil rights audits as counterpublic strategy: articulating the responsibility and failure to care for marginalized communities in platform governance

ABSTRACT

This study examines civil society engagement with the 2016–2020 Airbnb and Facebook civil rights audits as counterpublic strategies to address discriminatory harms on platforms. Drawing on critical theories of (counter)publics, care work, and civil rights, we explore (1) civil society organizations’ negotiations with various stakeholders in the audits, (2) the perceived utility of the audits as a platform governance mechanism, and (3) motivations behind using a civil rights framework for auditing platforms. Based on interviews and textual analysis, we find that civil society used dualistic strategies, working with and against platforms to navigate corporate and government neglect of digital harms to marginalized communities and negotiate asymmetric power structures. Groups used the audits to urge platforms to respect civil rights law while asking them to address areas beyond the existing law. They also mobilized the audits to achieve immediate ‘harm reduction’ from the platforms while simultaneously advocating for government regulation by demonstrating the audits’ limitations. In the process, the civil society counterpublic faced challenges from the externalization of responsibility by platforms and the co-option and politicization of civil rights. As a result, we argue, the utility of the audits may ultimately lie in how their limitations and failure can be used by counterpublics to rearticulate responsibility for harm to marginalized communities in platform governance.

KEYWORDS:

• platform governance
• civil rights
• auditing
• digital harms
• civil society
• counterpublic

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank members of the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, participants of the Conference of Platform Governance Research Network in 2021, and two anonymous journal reviewers for their helpful feedback on the earlier versions of this manuscript. We also appreciate the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism for their support of this research through research fellowships.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The parent company Facebook has since rebranded as ‘Meta’; here we continue to use ‘Facebook’ to refer to both company and platform as was the case during the auditing process.

2 The Facebook audit was led by Laura Murphy and law firm Relman Colfax. We focus on the role of Murphy as few interviewees mentioned the law firm.

3 For example, van Dijck et al. (2018) stresses the role of platforms in ‘organiz[ing] interactions between users,’ which includes Airbnb and Facebook, while Gillespie (2018) emphasizes the hosting of third-party content and sees Airbnb as more ‘platform-like.’

4 The coalitions working on the audits were fairly flexible, with organizations engaging at different levels over time. While they often coordinated strategy, individual organizations could choose when to participate and continued to meet separately with Airbnb and Facebook outside of coalition work.

5 This is a loose categorization meant to point to one difference in backgrounds and approaches; it should not be considered a formal typology of the organizations involved.

6 This was raised not to point to the lack of remuneration, but rather because it signaled a lack of meaningful engagement with civil rights.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a USC Annenberg Summer Research Fellowship and a USC Dissertation Grant.

Notes on contributors

Jeeyun (Sophia) Baik

Dr. Jeeyun (Sophia) Baik is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of San Diego. Her research explores the politics of regulating media, technologies, and data. In her research, she interrogates the implications of tech policies across borders and for marginalized communities in particular.

Hamsini Sridharan

Hamsini Sridharan is a doctoral candidate at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She studies historical and contemporary entanglements of digital technologies with environmental imaginaries and speculative futures, asking how such entanglements shape the critique, contestation, and governance of technology.