Mazzurco, Sari, The Law of Social Roles for The Platform Internet (February 21, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4040152 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4040152

“Social roles are integral to social life. Roles like teacher, judge, and employee help people navigate interactions by supplying them with meaning—specifically, societal expectations about actors’ appropriate behaviors in a particular relationship. In the emergent relationship between online platforms and people, social roles are altogether uncertain, leading to confusion about how platforms and people should treat one another. When an online platform takes down a mother’s breastfeeding photo, does it act inappropriately? In large part, the answer will depend on whether we construe the platform as a business, speech governor, common carrier, or something else entirely. That is, it will depend on the social role assigned to the platform. Without this basic understanding of platforms’ social roles, most claims that platforms have caused social harm seem impressionistic and unworthy of legal recourse. That is a problem when law seeks to remedy social problems. This Article explores how law contributed to this socio-legal dysfunction and might also contribute to its solution. Law often informs the meaning of social roles and sometimes constructs them anew. In the process, it sets boundaries of appropriate behavior, justifies regulations compatible with the roles it imagines, and generates resistance to others. Before online platforms rose to prominence, lawmakers were inattentive to the social roles developing in information privacy, speech, and competition law. These areas of law came to respond predominantly to a “business-consumer” relationship that now minimizes platforms’ social obligations and cabins possible legal reforms. Lawmakers may rectify these pitfalls by consciously approaching the question of what roles platforms and people should play as they interact and, ultimately, constructing multiple social roles for platforms and people. This Article aids that effort by presenting several platform regulation initiatives in terms of the social roles they construct, the boundaries those roles set for platforms’ and people’s behavior, and the subsequent legal reforms they support or resist.”