Governance: Private ordering of ComAI through corporate communication and policies (ComAI P4)
- 2025 – 2028
- Prof. Dr. Christian Katzenbach
The sub-project of the research group 'Communicative AI' (ComAI) examines how tech corporations establish rules for their products and how societal actors can exert influence on them.
How does content moderation for Communicative AI work? What are the issues and controversies that tech companies need to respond to? This project examines content moderation and private ordering — the regulation of behavior through rules set by private companies rather than the state — as a key dimension of how new media such as Communicative AI (ComAI) come to be defined and shaped in practice.
The emergence of new technologies is not only a technical process, but also a normative one: companies make consequential decisions about what their products should and should not do. These decisions can become part of broader public controversies. How should systems like ChatGPT handle political content and potential misinformation? Where is the appropriate line between creative inspiration and copyright infringement? Such questions have substantial implications for what ComAI applications become in practice — and for the societies that use them.
Against this background, we ask two related questions: First, what are the rules and norms that ComAI systems operate on? Second, do public controversies and regulation effectively challenge or reshape corporate decisions?
We investigate these questions across four cases — Alphabet’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Amazon’s Alexa, and Mistral AI’s Le Chat — selected to capture variation across company size, geographic origin (US vs. EU), and application type. We use three empirical approaches: (1) the analysis of key controversies in media coverage, (2) the systematic examination of acceptable use policies and platform guidelines, and (3) the study of how companies position themselves within controversies through corporate communication.
As part of this project, we are also expanding the Platform Governance Archive to include a dedicated collection documenting and archiving the policies of ComAI and GenAI products over time. This will create a valuable open resource for the research community studying platform governance and the emergence of AI products.
Conference and Workshop Organisation
From Platform Governance to Generative AI: Concepts, Methods, and Data for Studying Tech Governance. AoIR Flashpoint Symposium 2025. 3-4 June 2025. Bremen, Germany.
Workshop “Digital Service Act Art. 40: Promise vs. Practice”. 26 November. Bremen, Germany.
Presentations
Ermler, K., Katzenbach, C. (2026): Platform Goverance Archive: Forschungsdaten zu Regeln in Social Media und Generative AI. DGPuK Jahrestagung, Institut für Journalistik der Technischen Universität Dortmund.
Katzenbach, C., Ermler, K., Runge, L. (2025). To Ghibli or not to Ghibli? How Tech Companies Set Normative Standards on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence for Creative Practices. GenAI & Creative Practices: Past, Present, and Future, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam.
Katzenbach, C., Ermler, K., Runge, L. (2025). Content Moderation, next Level? Emergence of Platform Governance from Social Media to Generative AI. PlatGovNet 2025, Online.
Publications
Bareis, J., & Katzenbach, C. (2021). Talking AI into Being: The Narratives and Imaginaries of National AI Strategies and Their Performative Politics. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 47(5), 855–881. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439211030007
Bory, P., Natale, S., & Katzenbach, C. (2025). Strong and weak AI narratives: An analytical framework. AI & SOCIETY, 40(4), 2107–2117. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-02087-8
Gorwa, R., Binns, R., & Katzenbach, C. (2020). Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance: Big Data & Society, 7(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951719897945
Hepp, A., Loosen, W., Dreyer, S., Jarke, J., Kannengießer, S., Katzenbach, C., Malaka, R., Pfadenhauer, M. P., Puschmann, C., & Schulz, W. (2023). ChatGPT, LaMDA, and the Hype Around Communicative AI: The Automation of Communication as a Field of Research in Media and Communication Studies. Human-Machine Communication, 6, 41–63. https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.6.4.
Katzenbach, C. (2021a). “AI will fix this” – The Technical, Discursive, and Political Turn to AI in Governing Communication. Big Data & Society, 8(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211046182
Katzenbach, C., Kopps, A., Magalhães, J. C., Redeker, D., Sühr, T., & Wunderlich, L. (2023). The Platform Governance Archive v1 – A longitudinal dataset to study the governance of communication and interactions by platforms and the historical evolution of platform policies [Data Paper]. https://doi.org/10.26092/ELIB/2331
Marres, N., Katzenbach, C., Munk, A. K., & Jobin, A. (2025). On the controversiality of AI: The controversy is not the situation. Big Data & Society, 12(4), 20539517251383870. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251383870
Richter, V., Katzenbach, C., & Schäfer, M. S. (2023). Imaginaries of artificial intelligence. In S. Lindgren (Eds.), Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 209–223). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803928562.00024
Mao, Y., Richter, V., & Katzenbach, C. (2025). Strategising imaginaries: How corporate actors in China, Germany and the US shape AI governance. Big Data & Society, 12(4), 20539517251400727. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251400727