Contesting online exclusion EU-regulation of content moderation through an agonistic lens

This interdisciplinary dissertation explores and critiques the space EU law (in)directly affords people to contest, challenge, and renegotiate the current unequal moderation of online speech on the large social media platforms. It aims to chart the relation between the unequal exclusion of marginalised groups and the contestability of content moderation systems and, subsequently, to analyse the actual and potential role of EU platform regulation in this dynamic. The underlying goal of this project, spanning information law, political philosophy, and some qualitative empirical research, is to recentre people’s agency in platform governance.
The dissertation builds on agonistic democratic theory to argue that centring contestation is vital to understanding both how systemic discriminatory online exclusion functions in these large socio-technical systems as well as the ways in which the law is deeply implicated. Simultaneously, it illuminates how (research into) legal reform could potentially contribute to a way forward. To this point, the dissertation advocates for interdisciplinary and grounded platform governance research, embedded within a concrete struggle and oriented towards a broader political horizon. Recommendations for reforms or policies should not follow solely from theoretical or legal analyses. Instead, they should result from broader interdisciplinary work to address underlying systems of oppression, centring those subjected to them.
By centring conflict and contestation, this dissertation offers a perspective on the dynamics of exclusion and the potential for democratic governance in complex sociotechnical systems that others can build on.