The Role of Community Governance

Resisting Online Information Manipulation: The Role of Community Governance

Please read the Virtual Event Code of Conduct. We will be recording the event presentations, but not discussions.

This event will take place April 4th, 2025 at 12pm to 2pm CT. It will feature Professor Paul Gowder (Northwestern University) and Zarine Kharazian (University of Washington). Register now!

Online communities face threats to information integrity through coordinated activity and the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. The most prominent approaches to combating information manipulation in online spaces focus on empowering individuals, disrupting external networks, and/or countering narratives. These approaches overlook the critical role of community governance and organizational design in making communities resilient to more systematic threats.

Aspects of community governance—such the extent of centralized authority or the processes by which rules or content moderation decisions are made—can exacerbate vulnerabilities or catalyze resilience to information integrity threats. For example, social media platforms like Facebook professionalize content moderation functions and rely heavily on automated technologies, but often fail to offer mechanisms of accountability or representation. The "composable moderation" approach pursued by Bluesky offers users autonomy to set their own moderation policies and protocols, but introduces coordination and collective action problems. Wikipedia language editions make and enforce their own rules, but these rules and rulemaking remain vulnerable to coordinated attacks. How should communities understand and weigh the tradeoffs of different governance models? This Community Dialogue advances an organizational and institutional approach to online information integrity and manipulation, with the goal of sparking discussion on how to design online governance systems more resistant to multiple types of attacks.

Zarine Kharazian (University of Washington) will discuss approaches to safeguarding information integrity in adversarial online environments. Online communities steward a complex set of information-related public goods, ranging from encyclopedic knowledge to collective sense-making infrastructures during crises. The integrity of these goods, however, is increasingly contested: we have witnessed organized attempts to appropriate them through governance capture, as well as to undermine their broader epistemic legitimacy. Drawing on comparative examples from Wikipedia language editions, this talk will explore organizational and institutional approaches that enable communities to effectively steward information commons in the face of these attacks.

Paul Gowder (Northwestern University) will discuss the state of platform governance, the fractured information environment, and the future of (platform) democracy. In The Networked Leviathan, Gowder advocated more participatory and multi-level governance as a corrective to the “democratic deficit” and lack of accountability of social media platforms. In this talk, he will discuss threats and updates to this framework in light of recent developments. The current moment demands the simultaneous democratization of platforms and the re-democratization of the United States—a reconstruction that must be both political and economic. What can and should this alternative future look like?

Speaker Bios

• Zarine Kharazian is a PhD candidate in Human-Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on online influence operations and the design of institutional and organizational responses to them. At UW, she works with two research groups: the Center for an Informed Public and the Community Data Science Collective. She previously worked at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, where she conducted research on disinformation campaigns and led trainings on open-source investigation for civil society and journalists.

• Paul Gowder is Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. His research focuses on the rule of law, democratic theory, social and racial equality, institutional and organizational governance, law and technology, and classical Athenian law and political thought. In January 2024, he published The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms.

This event is organized by the Community Data Science Collective and hosted and supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation grant (IIS-2045055) so that it will be held at no cost to attendees. A code of conduct will be shared with participants prior to the event. Discussions will be held under Chatham House Rule. Presentations will be recorded, though discussions will not.