Crosset, V., Venturini, T., & Dupont, B. (2026). Content moderation as traffic control: an analysis of EU and US legislation on platform regulation. Critical Studies on Security, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2026.2692735
Summary
This paper analyses seven recent EU and US laws governing online platforms — Germany’s NetzDG, Austria’s KommAustria law, the UK Online Safety Act, the EU Digital Services Act, Florida’s SB 7072, Texas’s HB 20, and California’s AB 587 — treating content moderation as a contemporary form of security governance over the circulation of information. Through a quali-quantitative network analysis of legal language, the authors identify three distinct circulation regimes (free circulation, patrolling, and flow optimisation) that nonetheless converge on a shared logic the authors term “security bureaucratisation”: states do not directly control content but translate security imperatives into administrative procedures — transparency, auditing, reporting — that program how platforms govern flows from a distance, turning them into quasi-public infrastructures.
Key Contributions
- Introduces the concept of security bureaucratisation to describe how states enact security through administrative rationalities embedded in private platforms.
- Develops a comparative framework within Critical Security Studies that links regulatory diversity to distinct security assemblages rather than treating regulation as converging on a single model.
- Reframes transparency as a governmentality technique — a distributed security apparatus — rather than a neutral accountability mechanism.
- Bridges Critical Security Studies with regulation and governance literatures (meta-regulation, regulatory capitalism, enforced self-regulation).
- Demonstrates the value of network-based digital methods for mapping legal-discursive fields, an approach rare in security studies.
Methods
A comparative quali-quantitative textual analysis of seven legislative texts. Using the Cortext NLP toolchain, the authors extracted ~2,000 noun-phrase expressions, manually curated for regulatory relevance, then segmented each law into sections treated as separate documents. They constructed a bipartite expression–document network weighted by Pearson chi-squared specificity (filtering edges below 0.29) and visualised it with ForceAtlas2 to surface clusters, iterating between this distant reading and close qualitative reading of the laws and secondary literature.
Findings
- Three circulation regimes emerge from the network: free circulation (Florida, Texas) restricting platform moderation power; patrolling (Germany, Austria) demanding rapid takedown of illegal content within strict deadlines; and flow optimisation (EU DSA, UK OSA) emphasising anticipatory systemic-risk management.
- Each regime configures a distinct state role: constrainer, arbitrator, or administrator of platforms.
- Two clusters — transparency and the enrolment of auditors/experts — cut across all regimes, revealing a shared bureaucratic infrastructure.
- Security bureaucratisation operates via three modalities: compelled rule formalisation, mandated quantification through reporting, and institutionalised independent auditing.
- Each regime encodes specific temporalities (NetzDG’s 24-hour deletion, DSA’s annual audits, California’s continuous reporting) that program circulation rhythms.
- Paradoxically, the free circulation regime requires substantial state coercion to enforce non-intervention, showing that even libertarian stances generate bureaucratic burden.
Connections
This paper sits alongside other work treating platform regulation as an emergent governance regime rather than a content-policy problem — connecting to Rieder2026-pp and Rieder2025-ju on platform regulation and infrastructural power, and to Farkas2026-lr on legal-regulatory framings of platforms. Its analysis of the DSA’s audit and transparency machinery resonates with empirical work on data access and platform accountability such as Ahuja2025-ku and de-Vreese2026-zx, while its framing of moderation-as-governance complements debates over moderation policy traced in Donovan2025-ws.
Podcast
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