Jeeyun (Sophia) Baik (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of San Diego (USD). Her research broadly explores the politics of regulating media, technologies, and data. She examines how emerging communication technologies and their governance (re)configure and are shaped by power dynamics among socio-political actors. Her work specifically looks into issues of digital privacy, networked surveillance, content moderation, the data economy, and artificial intelligence (AI). Her research has been published in Telecommunications Policy, The Information Society, Telematics & Informatics, and Information, Communication & Society, among others. Before joining USD, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, UC Berkeley.
Abstract : As digital platforms mediate many aspects of people’s everyday experiences, how society governs these platforms and how platforms govern themselves are critical to safeguarding our public and private lives. In this talk, Dr. Baik introduces two studies that explore the political dynamics and politicization of platform governance, focusing on cases from the United States while discussing their global implications. First, she presents a collaborative study that analyzed civil society engagement with the 2016–2020 Airbnb and Facebook civil rights audits. The study found that civil society used dual strategies, working with and against platforms, to address the corporate and government neglect of digital harms to marginalized communities. Next, she discusses a working project that examines how the claim that mainstream platform content moderation is biased against conservative views, even when found unsubstantiated, continues to be shaped and widely propagated. The study maps this claim across four dimensions: ideological/legal, political, social, and platform-based. Together, these studies highlight the importance of understanding platform governance as a multifaceted and constantly evolving process of contestation among socio-political actors.
