Content regulation on digital platforms has become a contested issue on the public and scholarly agendas. To understand how digital platform providers experiment with making commitments regarding their regulation, this article process-traces Facebook’s content regulation to ask how it self-regulates despite constant pressures for policy intervention. The first part of the article shows how Facebook moved from its initial “thin” self-regulatory regime toward what I call “enhanced self-regulation,” which relies on first-party and independent third-party intermediaries. Thereafter, I show how Facebook self-regulated the balance between public and private interests over time and across the regimes. The findings suggest that powerful actors such as Facebook can innovate in self-regulation by reallocating content-related responsibilities to intermediaries and subsequently create polycentric governance regimes. Lessons about how self-regulators that face public criticism can make more credible commitments to public interests are then drawn from the strengths and weakness of enhanced self-regulation.

数字平台上的内容监管已成为公众和学术议程上有争议的问题。为了了解数字平台提供商如何对他们的法规做出承诺，本文对Facebook的内容法规进行了过程跟踪，以询问尽管面临持续不断的政策干预压力，Facebook如何自我监管。本文的第一部分显示了Facebook是如何从最初的“瘦身”自我监管体制转变为所谓的“增强自我监管”的，后者依靠第一方和独立的第三方中介机构。此后，我将展示Facebook如何随着时间的推移以及整个政权体系自我调节公共利益与私人利益之间的平衡。研究结果表明，像Facebook这样的强大参与者可以通过将与内容相关的责任重新分配给中介机构，并随后建立多中心的治理机制来创新自我监管。然后，从加强自我监管的优势和劣势中汲取关于如何面对公众批评的自我调节者如何对公共利益做出更可信承诺的经验教训。