As part of our research on platform governance and based on data from the Platform Governance Archive, the article “Fixing election interference, safeguarding election integrity? Developments and dynamics of election-related policies on social media platforms”, written by Prof. Christian Katzenbach, Vasilisa Kuznetsova and Prof. Elizabeth Dubois, has been published in Information, Communication & Society.
The paper examines how major social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter and TikTok, have developed election-related policies over time. The authors identify three phases in the development of election-related platform policies. An early phase focused on protecting election processes and actors from interference. During a second phase platforms increasingly recognised their role in shaping public debate and took on greater responsibility for protecting democratic processes. In the last few years, however, many platforms have scaled back some of these commitments and become more cautious in their approach.
The study suggests that these developments are shaped both by broader debates about the responsibilities of digital platforms and by specific election-related events, particularly recent US elections. By tracing changes in platform policies over time, the article contributes to a better understanding of how platforms govern democratic participation and respond to evolving expectations of accountability.
Read the article:
Katzenbach, C., Kuznetsova, V., & Dubois, E. (2026). Fixing election interference, safeguarding election integrity? Developments and dynamics of election-related policies on social media platforms. Information, Communication & Society, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2686320