TILEC will be organizing a policy-oriented, academic workshop on “Economic Governance of Social Media” on 25-26 September 2025. Details and submission guidelines are here and on the workshop’s website. Deadline is 15 June. The background of the workshop follows below.

In 2023, there were 4.76 billion social media users worldwide, comprising 60% of the world population and over 90% of internet users. While social media have created a range of well-documented benefits, both for businesses and for individual users, the list of negative effects for democracy, individuals and society at large is growing: distribution of misinformation and hate speech, manipulation of individuals’ beliefs and behavior through news selection, the sheer amount of time spent on social media platforms, keeping people away from being productive, and negative trends in mental health, especially amongst children and young adults, cast a long, dark shadow over social media’s net effects.

Political scientist Lars Rensmann, asked about reasons for the recent upswing of radical right parties, summarized: ”Not populists like Trump but social media are the biggest threat.” The documented growing discontent of many voters with the political establishment (and more and more: the system of liberal democracy with rule of law and political checks and balances on those in power) has thrived on social media. Over the past decade, we have seen how social media has contributed to an extremely polarized society. Especially young people depend very much on TikTok in their news diet, where radical right-wingers successfully proclaim their message and facts matter little. Adults, too, often consume a large part of their news via social media or news aggregator sites. As Rensmann puts it: “Democracies work only when politics is based on facts. As long as that is not the case and people are shaped by propaganda, democracies are doomed.” The Financial Times’ editorial board proclaimed: “Europe’s democratic values are so fundamental that its leaders should not shy from enforcing rules designed to protect them — even if that risks clashing with the X or Meta bosses, or the returning US president.”

For Rensmann, the example of Elon Musk is a point of crystallization: “He has 203 million followers, he owns X, he spreads hate and disinformation, and he influences elections. Someone needs to stand up and not just say that social media is worrisome, but actually do something about the power of big business.”
This is the starting point for this workshop on “Economic Governance of Social Media.” While we understand that a service used by 60% of the world’s population must deliver some benefits, we take it as a working hypothesis that social media’s negative effects must be contained. The question is how, and by whom?

Such questions are the premise of the field of economic governance, which studies the structure and functioning of the legal and social institutions that support economic activity and economic transactions by protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and taking collective action to provide physical and organizational infrastructure (Dixit, 2009, p.5). Economic governance is a broad concept that hosts both public-ordering institutions (governance by state authorities), private-ordering institutions (governance by formal or informal non-state actors), and hybrid forms. It tries to identify the optimal institutional setup, i.e., the optimal allocation of control rights over the design, adjudication, and enforcement of rules in any given socioeconomic environment.

The Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC) has organized six economic governance workshops, which focused on the role of competition (in 2010), organizations (in 2013), social preferences (in 2015), data-driven markets (in 2017), the governance of big data and AI (in 2019), and political legitimacy (in 2022), respectively. Now, we strive to stimulate the debate how the negative effects of social media could be contained, both conceptually, practically, legally, and technically. During a multidisciplinary, discussion-intensive, deeply theoretical and policy-oriented two-day workshop in September 2025, we aim to learn from theoretical, empirical, experimental, and conceptual papers addressing the main question from various angles.

Specific topics of interest, organizational details, and submission guidelines are in the call for papers and on the workshop’s website.