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Abstract
As digital platforms increasingly mediate communication and social interaction, their role in shaping rights and responsibilities online has become both pivotal and contested. Platforms govern user behaviour through design choices, rulemaking, and enforcement practices, including content moderation, algorithmic curation, and infrastructural control. These mechanisms not only influence online discourse but also define the boundaries of expression, safety, and accountability in the digital public sphere. Understanding platform governance is therefore essential to analysing the broader architecture of internet regulation and its implications for human rights.
This paper examines the policies of twenty-nine platforms across categories including social media, messaging services, dating apps, video-sharing platforms, and adult content sites. Using Terms of Service and Community Guidelines collected in 2024, the study analyses patterns of policy design, moderation frameworks, readability, and transparency. The findings demonstrate significant disparities: larger social media and video platforms maintain comprehensive guidelines with explicit enforcement and appeal mechanisms, while messenger and adult content platforms rely on minimal or opaque frameworks, often limited to legally mandated prohibitions. These divergences create fragmented protections against online harms, reflecting commercial incentives, infrastructural constraints, and uneven regulatory pressures.
Despite the harmonising ambitions of the EU Digital Services Act, platform responses reveal considerable variation in compliance and effectiveness. While some services align with regulatory standards, others adopt only minimal measures, raising questions about the capacity of EU governance instruments to ensure uniform protection. The study argues that these disparities underscore persistent tensions between platforms’ commercial priorities, technical architectures, and human rights obligations. Addressing them requires stronger enforcement mechanisms, clearer normative benchmarks, and more inclusive governance approaches that balance corporate autonomy with the protection of users.
