Platform governance continues to grow in importance and intellectual vibrancy as an interdisciplinary field of research. A changing mix of competing platform companies faced with various efforts to regulate, influence, or control them and their offers has become an ever more central feature of many societies. As monolithic services begin to fracture and decentralized platform infrastructures, some governments assert their power and authority, and new constellations of actors emerge, we witness more than mere technical transitions and instead realignments in the political economy of platforms and societies. These changes manifest through multiple frictions across state, market, and civil society – between digital sovereignty and transnational platform operations, established market leaders and nascent alternatives, context and consistency, regulatory intent and practice, and between pragmatic appraisals and normative aspirations. Understanding these transitions demand empirical analysis and may require new conceptual and methodological approaches.

The 2025 Platform Governance Research Network (PlatGovNet) online conference seeks submissions focused on these issues. We welcome a wide range of different perspectives and interests, including, but not limited to, submissions that focus on the complex and contentious politics of platforms, for example new (geo)political tensions, developments around generative artificial intelligence, and the wider diversity of rarely examined actors including smaller platforms, non-state actors, and middleware initiatives.

This is the third PlatGovNet international online conference, which brings together researchers engaging with the social and political questions posed by the transformation and emerging realities of the platformized societies. We seek to foster cutting-edge interdisciplinary research that critically engages with the social and political questions posed by a broad range of digital platforms. Beyond showcasing current research and getting feedback, the conference helps participants build community and find collaborators.

List of Topics

In particular, network members are typically interested in:

• Empirical studies of platform governance in all of its forms, including investigations into the emerging platform infrastructures, the labor practices, technologies, and institutional arrangements that characterize new governance configurations, and the implications for users, platforms, communities, and society;
• Conceptual contributions that may describe and interpret current changes in platform governance, namely (but not exclusively): decentralization; middleware; bridge-building, “prosocial” or “community-based” moderation techniques and philosophies;
• Policy-oriented analyses of private and governmental efforts to govern platforms, including comparative studies of governmental interventions across different geopolitical contexts, through both formal regulatory frameworks and informal governance mechanisms;
• Normative, conceptual, or theoretical insights into aspects of platform governance, especially those that highlight gaps in current public or scholarly discourse;
• Historical analyses and temporal perspectives on platform governance and speech moderation more widely;
• Methodological innovations for studying platform governance in transition, particularly in the absence of affordable or stable platform APIs;
• Research on the meta-aspects of platform governance scholarship, examining how the relationships between industry, government, academia and civil society are being reconfigured, and how these shifts impact knowledge production and policy development in the field.

We are keen on incorporating multiple perspectives from researchers located all around the world, so we encourage submissions from under-represented groups and diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds. We are especially interested in perspectives outside of U.S. and European contexts and will strive to accommodate multiple participant time zones in the conference program.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit extended abstracts of 800-1000 words via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=platgovnet2025.

Abstracts will be blind peer-reviewed and should include:

• a short section framing the context/problem being addressed;
• a clear research question;
• conceptual framework;
• details about how the submission seeks to address that question, including its research design; and 
• a brief discussion of the paper’s contributions to the literature and/or ongoing policy debates.

Authors of selected abstracts will present their ongoing work at the online conference. Submission of a complete paper before the Conference will not be required, although the organizers and PlatGovNet will, where useful, seek to help advise participants on possible avenues for publication.

This conference is open to all interested researchers and members of civil society and will have no registration fee. 

Timeline

• Deadline for abstract submission: end of day September 2, aka 00:00:00 anywhere on earth time
• Accepted submissions announced: mid-October 2025
• Online conference: December 1-2, 2025

Venue

Online

Contact

Please contact conference@platgov.net with any questions.

About

The conference is an event of the Platform Governance Network, an international community of researchers. We host a major online conference and facilitate workshops, collaborations, and other informal and formal mechanisms to help build ties between researchers from different cultural, disciplinary, and geographic backgrounds.

We are interdisciplinary, seeking to pull conversations about various dimensions of platform governance out of their disciplinary and in-person silos. We work to maintain an independent forum for research and collaboration between academics and research-oriented members of civil society, and seek to facilitate and foster opportunities to broaden the emerging field of platform governance, not only in terms of depth and scope, but also in terms of access and representation. We’re looking to make these ongoing academic and policy debates more global and accessible than they currently are.

2025 Platform Governance Research Network Conference Organizing Committee

• Pranav Bidare, Center for Internet and Society
• Robert Gorwa, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
• Ivar Hartmann, Insper São Paulo
• Clara Iglesias Keller, Weizenbaum Institute, WZB Berlin Social Science Center
• Emillie de Keulenaar, University of Copenhagen
• Diyi Liu, University of Copenhagen
• João C. Magalhães, University of Manchester
• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, University of Copenhagen