Globalizing the European Media Order: The Brussels Effect in Times of Crisis

Renate Nikolay is Head of Cabinet of Vĕra Jourová, Vice-President for Values and Transparency, working on matters such as rule of law or disinformation. She was Director in charge of Asia and Latin America in DG Trade and, from 2014 to 2019, she was Head of Cabinet of the Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality where she played a key role in the adoption of the data protection reform and the establishment of the European Public Prosecutor and the Code of Conduct with platforms on online hate speech. She holds a law degree (erstes und zweites Staatsexamen) from the Free University of Berlin.

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.

About the Insights and Power conversation series

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.

Therefore “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. 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 for?

The Conversation Series is organised 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.