Five billion people, or approximately 60% of the world’s population, are on social media. A few transnational media companies’ platforms moderate more speech than any government in the world. Given global linguistic diversity, how do these companies serve, and struggle to serve, their multilingual users?

This talk will look at questions of digital inequality raised by language-related processes and policies in transnational media companies, and ponder what we can reasonably expect from them, balancing between their profit motive and outsized influence. Facebook (owned by Meta) will be used as a case study. The paper posits that language management is central to the product offered by social media companies and should be a critical component of digital governance. It encourages thinking about the role of private actors in exercising control and influence on the symbolic capital of languages in the global linguistic market (Bourdieu 1991).

Professor Janny Leung works in the intersection between linguistics and law. Her last monograph, Shallow Equality and Symbolic Jurisprudence in Multilingual Legal Orders, won the Faculty Research Output Prize in 2020. The book focuses on challenges, ideologies, and paradoxes in multilingual legal practice. An author/editor of 3 books and 30+ scholarly articles and chapters, Leung has written about language rights, legal interpretation, unrepresented litigation, courtroom discourse, legal translation, and representations of law in the media. She had been a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Yenching Institute, a Luce East Asia Fellow at the National Humanities Center (USA), and a RGC Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellow.