Project overview
SAFE-net studies online safety, content moderation, age assurance, and platform governance in digital markets. Online platforms are intermediaries in which content is uploaded, shared, and consumed by users, creating monetization opportunities through engagement but also exposing users and off-platform citizens to potentially harmful content. The project asks when platforms have sufficient incentives to intervene on their own and when regulation becomes necessary, in direct connection with current debates around the EU Digital Services Act, the UK Online Safety Act, US age verification laws, and platform-liability regimes. SAFE-net combines theory and data: it develops a broader framework for understanding platform governance and moderation incentives, and studies actual moderation practices and policy interventions using public and proprietary data, including age verification in adult platforms and ex-post analyses of platform interventions with room for structural counterfactual analysis.
