The growth of online platforms is accompanied by the increasing use of automated
agents. Despite being discussed primarily in the context of opinion manipulation, agents
play diverse roles within platform ecosystems that raises the need for governance
approaches that go beyond policing agents’ unwanted behaviour. To provide a more
nuanced assessment of agent governance, we introduce an analytical framework that
distinguishes between different aspects and forms of governance. We then apply it to
explore how agents are governed across nine platforms. Our observations show that
despite acknowledging diverse roles of agents, platforms tend to focus on governing
selected forms of their misuse. We also observe differences in governance approaches
used by platforms, in particular when it comes to the agent rights/obligations and
transparency of policing mechanisms. These observations highlight the necessity of
advancing the algorithmic governance research agenda and developing a generalizable
normative framework for agent governance.
