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Shortest (>20 words)
Robert Gorwa is a political scientist and technology governance scholar at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).
Short (35)
Robert Gorwa is a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). His books include The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Medium (140)
Dr Robert Gorwa is a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), and a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). He studies the politics of technology policymaking, with special interest paid to the institutions and socio-technical regulatory arrangements shaping governance in the digital economy. Most notably, he has published extensively on the organizational and political logics of `platform governance' by major technology firms, the tools and techniques for automated content analysis and moderation at the scale of the global internet, and more recently, on the safety questions facing `AI intermediaries' in the generative AI ecosystem. His first book, The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation, a comparative empirical study of the development of new `online safety' frameworks in the transnational context, was published open access in 2024 by Oxford University Press.
Long and Extra-Formal (315)
Robert Gorwa is a postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), and a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. His work bridges politics, law, and media studies to engage conceptually and empirically with the latest developments in global technology policymaking, taking a special interest in emerging socio-technical governance infrastructures and institutions in the platform economy.
Gorwa studied politics, history, and economics in Montreal and Vancouver before moving to Oxford to do graduate work in media and internet studies. A renewed interest in digital public policy and regulation culminated in a DPhil from Oxford's Department of Politics and International Relations, as well as collaborative research conducted at the Oxford Internet Institute, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, and the European Studies Centre at St. Antony's College (where he was a Dahrendorf Scholar). His doctoral work on the transnational contestation of platform governance won the university's Marchioness of Winchester Prize, and was revised, expanded, and published as The Politics of Platform Regulation: How Governments Shape Online Content Moderation by Oxford University Press in 2024.
Gorwa joined the WZB in 2021. He has also held fellowships and other visiting positions at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, Stanford's Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, as well as the Weizenbaum and Alexander von Hulboldt Internet Institutes. He has presented his work for policymakers in various jurisdictions, including at the US-EU Trade and Technology Council and the EU Observatory on the Online Platform Economy; his work has been cited by the US Federal Trade Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and in major international AI policy reports. He has consulted for Human Rights Watch and other NGOs, and is currently working on a second book, in collaboration with Michael Veale at University College London.