Two Trusts and a Court: Adapting Legal Mechanisms for Building Trust in Technology Governance

This article analyzes governance interventions designed by Facebook and Sidewalk Labs to  address  concerns  about  content  governance  and  privacy,  respectively.  Using  a comparative  approach,  we  analyze  how  Sidewalk  Lab’s  proposed  data  trust  for  the Quayside Project—a smart city project in Toronto—and Facebook’s Oversight Board—an independent  panel  that  makes  content  moderation  decisions—are  adapted  from  legal mechanisms that reflect what Luhmann describes as system trust. We also interrogate the use  of  intermediaries  to  shore  up  the  trustworthiness  of  the  companies with  the  publicexpert  and  lay  publics.  This  article  echoes  existing  research  on  the  use  of  democratic models in attempts at technology governance strategies undertaken by companies and goes further to show how legal mechanisms of trusts and courts are being added to the repertoire of corporate tools for building trust.