The digital marketplace for social media communication has witnessed a surge in the number of platforms that exist. As user demand grows, there is greater willingness to shift to new and diverse platforms. For example, the ban of TikTok in India was quickly replaced by an emerging local platform like Chingari. While emerging platforms not only cater to unique needs of local populations, they also significantly differ from big tech platforms in governing against harms.
Community guidelines have predominantly existed as a pivotal tool in governing digital platforms, with a focus on mitigation of online harms, such as misinformation and hate speech, amongst others. While big tech platforms like YouTube and Meta have standardized guidelines that apply globally, local platforms, such as India's ShareChat or the Philippines' Kumu, have adopted a more contextual approach, tailored to specific societal norms and legal frameworks. This exploratory study aims to uncover patterns of governance across platforms and jurisdictions to assess diverse approaches in framing community guidelines. By focussing on global and local platforms, we intend to understand whether and how local platforms adopt more contextual approaches, while also keenly examining similarities that may arise.
This study adopts an analytical and exploratory research design to examine how digital platforms articulate and enforce community guidelines, with a particular focus on the extent of contextualization. Contextualization is understood here as the degree to which platform policies reflect region-specific considerations such as linguistic diversity, cultural references, and compliance with local legal frameworks.
Step One: Platform Selection
Platforms were selected purposively to ensure both diversity of scale and geographical relevance.
Meta was selected as a representative example of a big tech platform since it has a multi-jurisdictional presence with a wide user base of over 3.29 billion daily active users across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger and its community guidelines apply across those four major platforms. In contrast, ShareChat and Chingari were selected as representative examples of India based local platforms operating solely within India, while Kumu was selected to represent local apps operating exclusively in the Philippines. The inclusion of both global and local platforms enables a comparative inquiry into how contextualization varies across platform types.
The researcher collected publicly available community guidelines of the selected platforms:
● Big Tech Platforms: Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger)
● Indian Local Platforms: ShareChat, Chingari
● Philippines Local Platforms: Kumu
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Step Two: Defining the Contextual Lenses
To operationalize the concept of contextualization, the study limits its scope to two analytical lenses:
These two lenses allows for a focused and systematic analysis while maintaining cross-platform comparability.