The promises and challenges of identifying values in platform policies

Rebecca Scharlach | The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Who am I?

• Media and communication scholar
• Studying the intersection between platform governance and society
• Core member of the ERC-funded research project DigitalValues

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Why are values important for PlatGov research?

• Prominent in public discourse & law and policy
• Not studied systematically
• Scholars have flagged the importance of studying relationship between values & social media platforms (Gillespie et al., 2020; Leurs and Zimmer, 2017, van Dijck et al., 2018).
• Platform values remain slippery objects of analysis

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Platform Governance & Values

What are values?

• Notions about the desirable that guide judgment and behavior
• Where and how are values expressed on platforms?
• Personal values
• Cultural values
• Infrastructural values
• No single articulation of values offers a comprehensive view

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What are values?

Hallinan, Scharlach, & Shifman (2022)�

Platform values:

Underlying principles

expressed on and

through social media

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• Framework allows to identify the scale and explicitness of communication as sources of friction
• Platform values are contested
• Scale correlates with power

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Conceptualizing platform values

Terms of Service�Privacy Policy�Community Guidelines

Platform policies as �boundary objects

Boundary objects are �“scientific objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds. . .and satisfy the�informational requirements of each of them”�

Star & Griesemer, 1989:393

Social media platform policies as “ideal types” of boundary objects��

Star & Griesemer, 1989

Platform policy documents

How to find values in policies?

• Bird’s eye view of value terms through quantitative analysis
• Independent qualitative analysis to identify how platforms assign responsibility to various stakeholders & values used to construct the ideal platform and user

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How to find values in policies?

Natalie Heinich’s (2020) differentiation between three understandings of value:

• Value as worth
• Value as object
• Value as principle 

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We explore what platforms invoke as

important (values as objects) & governing

logics directing evaluation (values as

principles) 

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Identifying values in platform policies

Quantitative analysis

• Re-evaluated it to detect clusters, or groups of similar values
• Grounded theory approach (Kelle, 2007)
• Evaluated the words comparatively against

• WordStat (Lemmatization)

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• Corpus of words that appear at least 10 times in the documents (n = 820)

• Unlike sentiment analysis (e.g. Jamieson et al., 2022), no approach to distinguish value words from other words
• Build on existing value schemes (Christen et al., 2016; Schwartz, 2012).
• A word counts as a value if it (Heinich, 2020):
1. could guide decisions or behavior
2. has positive associations
3. could be applied to multiple contexts

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How to find values in policies

• Re-evaluated it to detect clusters, or groups of similar values
• Grounded theory approach (Kelle, 2007)
• Evaluated the words comparatively against each other based on existing value schemes (Christen et al., 2016; Schwartz, 2012).

Public values invoked in literature such as democracy (Vaidhyanathan, 2018), transparency (Van Dijck et al., 2018), and fairness (Cath et al., 2020) are largely absent from the policy documents

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Quantitative phase: results

Qualitative analysis

• Qualitative analysis based on grounded approach
• MaxQDA
• Focusing on different types of actors (the platform, general users, and business users).
• For each actor, we coded for desirable and undesirable behavior.

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• Platforms employ a consistent set of organizing logics
• Five core values: expression, community, safety, choice, and improvement
• Division of responsibility for the execution of values similar across platforms
• Reflect tension between economic and moral meaning of values
• Allows corporations to strategically reinterpret values to suit their interests

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Qualitative phase: results

• Platforms strategically assign and largely offload responsibility to users
• Vision of platform governance that significantly depends on self-governance (DeNardis and Hackl, 2015)

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Qualitative phase: results

• Methodological approach applicable for future studies such as:
• historical changes in policies over time
• different national contexts.
• Promotion of values through different outlets (e.g., transparency reports, press releases, financial disclosures)
• Qualitative analysis is not just beneficial, but necessary

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How can platform governance make use of this?

• How are values expressed in other modes?
• Value discourses are entangled with questions of power & responsibility
• Shift from talking about values in abstract to what values platforms actually promote

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How can platform governance make use of this?

The construction of values by �social media platforms

Social initiatives

(TikTok for Good)

Value affordances

Policies

Platform Values

THANKS!

Questions, comments, feedback?

rebecca.scharlach@huji.ac.il

rebeccascharlach.com

CREDITS: This presentation template was created by Slidesgo, including icons by Flaticon, infographics & images by Freepik and illustrations by Storyse

Additional illustrations by Blake Hallinan

CREDITS: This presentation template was created by Slidesgo, including icons by Flaticon, infographics & images by Freepik and illustrations by Storyset