Theorizing platform governance as a communicative process

Although a core concept in the field of communication, discourse and how it operates in policy-making has not received much attention from platform governance scholars. Accordingly, this study theorizes the relationship between platform governance and policy discourses, drawing on Julia Black’s work on regulatory conversations and Vivian Schmidt’s discursive institutionalism framework. We use the framework to conceptualize platform governance and attendant power relations between policy actors as constituted through institutionalized policy discourses. We apply the framework to examine Australia’s Online Safety Act, which introduces a co-regulatory platform governance approach to tackle illegal and harmful content and behaviour online. Our analysis situates the policy as a communicative constitution of platform governance and a product of the interplay between institutionalized power dynamics and policy discourses. Our framework and case study have implications for platform governance scholarship, offering insights into the role policy discourse plays in shaping and legitimating co-regulatory platform governance initiatives.