The Regulations of Social Meaning in the Digital Platform Era

The regulation of social meaning has traditionally been subjected to rational choice theory (RCT) perspectives in an age when the internet and technology were in nascent stages of development. Today, social meaning is being regulated in much more subtle but powerful ways by digital platforms who are leveraging behavioral economic (BE) insights to control, dictate, and reshape the social meaning of a variety of social roles, conduct, objects, and events. Whilst this form of social government (or private ordering of society’s social fabric) has obvious and desirable benefits to recalibrating society as a collective and assuaging or reversing the stereotyping potentially suffered by a variety of under-represented social groups— a process this Article refers to as replacing psychological defaults—it may also be questioned from several legal perspectives, including ‘digital constitutionalism’, antitrust, and the ‘platform power’ concept. This unprecedented shift towards more sophisticated and technical behavioral regulations of social meaning by digital platforms may thus generate the question of whether the regulation of social meaning should itself be regulated.