This is the inaugural event of the distinguished conversation series “Insights and Power” in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut. The event will be streamed live on the HIIG website. No registration is required.
She rarely gives interviews, so this was a rare opportunity to meet YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and learn more about her understanding of good content governance and the strategic direction of the video platform. On Thursday, 10 February, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulz spoke with Susan Wojcicki about the topic “Great Expectations: What Research Expects from Platforms and Platforms from Research”.
In the conversation, both Susan Wojcicki and Wolfgang Schulz emphasised the importance of collaboration between science and platforms:
“Academics play a key role to give a transparent understanding of platforms“, said Susan Wojcicki. YouTube has realised that it needs to open up more and provide researchers with more tools to have a better understanding of how the platform works. “The more academics and lawmakers understand YouTube’s content regulations, the more aligned we will be in our understanding of platform governance. That will be beneficial for all of us.”
“As lawyers, we become more and more interested in how platforms create their content regulations. They apply a mental model that is similar to the mental model lawmakers use when making law,” said Wolfgang Schulz.”
Great Expectations: What Research Expects from Platforms and Platforms from Research
The event, which was held in English, was moderated by Prof. Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann.
The recording of the conversation can be watched on TIDE Hamburg‘s YouTube channel
and will be shown on TIDE’s linear TV programme on Thursday, February 17 2022 | 8.15 pm
Join the discussion on slido
Susan Wojcicki is CEO of YouTube, a digital video platform used by over two billion people across the globe to access information, share video, and shape culture. She oversees YouTube’s content and business operations, engineering, and product development. Prior to joining YouTube in February 2014, Susan was Senior Vice President of Advertising & Commerce at Google, where she oversaw the design and engineering of AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, and Google Analytics. Since 2002, the led teams that helped define the vision and direction of Google’s monetization platforms. Susan graduated with honors from Harvard University, holds a master’s in economics from UC Santa Cruz, and an MBA from UCLA. In 2015, Susan was named to Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Wolfgang Schulz is Director of the Leibniz Institute for Media Research │ Hans Bredow Institute (HBI) and holds the university professorship “Media Law and Public Law including its Theoretical Foundations” at the Faculty of Law of the University of Hamburg. Since February 2012, he has been Research Director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG).
His work emphasises the freedom of communication, problems of legal regulation with regard to media contents, questions of law in new media, above all in digital television, and the legal bases of journalism, but also the jurisprudential bases of freedom of communication and the implications of the changing public sphere on law.
Insights and Power: Internet Scientists meet Decision-Makers
A key challenge to good platform governance is the existence of knowledge asymmetries between governance actors. Platforms, scientists, civil society, regulators all know different things and have different perspectives on key elements like socio-technical platform architectures, incentive structures, norm production systems, algorithmic tools, and user behaviour. In light of the growing body of research on how platforms develop rules, and how public values should be integrated into private orders, three Kantian questions remain for platform governance research and practice: What can scientists know? What should platforms do? What can governments hope?
Insights and Power. Internet Scientists meet Decision-Makers is a series of workshops and public-facing events that put key internet scientists in conversation with platform leaders. Together they will enquire what action knowledge is essential for impact-oriented platform research, how knowledge transfer to platforms and regulators can happen and how cross-disciplinary, international platform research can succesfully be financed and conducted.
The Conversation Series is organized by the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut and the Global Network for Internet and Society Research Centres, uniting more than 100 research centers of excellence on internet and society. HBI has recently established a Private Ordering Observatory, a Digital Disinformation Hub and a Social Media Observatory. HIIG has recently established the Platform Governance Archive.
