Platforms & Society

Contribution systems offer an alternative to price-based value in decentralised platforms. Drawing on examples from Ethereum and ecological restoration projects, this paper considers how contribution systems generate “interobjective value” by tracing dependencies between actions over time. Contribution systems may also provide novel mechanisms for addressing complex, longterm challenges, such as climate change, by aggregating and incentivising contributions and their underlying relations.

Questions regarding the quality of online platform data have gained significant attention and research focus in recent years. Inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent data are some of the many examples of data quality problems. At the same time, digital platforms have restricted access to their data in recent years. This strategy by digital platforms has now increasingly become the subject of political efforts of regulation, especially the Digital Services Act (DSA) of the European Union. Therefore, we argue that the quality of online platform data cannot solely be understood as a methodological, internal research construct but also as a contested concept in which various actors from politics, the tech industry, and academia negotiate and represent specific interests. To assess the role of data quality in and around the DSA, we analyze the content of the DSA itself, in particular Art. 40 and the respective Delegated Regulation (DR), as well as the feedback submitted to the European Commission's Call for Evidence and the Delegated Regulation draft. We then apply quantitative content analysis, multiple correspondence analysis, and thematic analysis. Results indicate that data quality plays little to no role in the official EU documents, namely, the DSA and the Delegated Regulation draft. In the public feedback, however, data quality concerns have been raised by various stakeholders in academia. Based on the results, we argue that data quality should play a more prominent role in the debate to fulfill the DSA aims of assessing systemic risks in the EU.

Platforms often serve as sites for practices of political consumerism, and exposure to news and political content through platforms can lead to increased engagement in such practices as boycotting and buycotting. However, platforms regularly intervene, visibly and invisibly, with the goings-on among their users, favoring their own techno-commercial logics. This critical analysis explores this tension between platforms and consumer protesters, asking how platforms relate to political consumerism through how they problematize and govern its practices. Using a governmentality lens, I focus on the case of review bombing on the video game platform Steam, arguing that the practice serves as an informal participation in politics that has been problematized by Steam as a social wrong within its population of users. Combining an analysis of Steam's public and developer-oriented policy documents with a critical walkthrough of its user review system, I explain how Steam has modified its platform affordances and discourses to directly and indirectly encourage a “helpful” consumer identity for its users while simultaneously depoliticizing reviews, games, and consumerism as a whole. This ongoing process, a discursive negotiation between platform governors and the governed, reveals not only the tenuous nature and future of political consumerism on platforms but also concerns for the increasing disparity in how segments of society conceive of power relations—and how they desire their change.

Hopes that the growth of platform work in Africa will provide new opportunities for women's employment have not yet been matched by empirical research. Based on a five-country survey of workers on 18 platforms across four sectors (ride-hailing, delivery, professional, microtasks), the research reported here makes the first direct, systematic comparison of men's and women's experiences of platform work in multiple African countries. The paper finds an absence of specific gender differences across many core operational structures of platform work including general shortcomings related to social protection, contracts, human/algorithmic management and representation being experienced similarly by both men and women. However, the paper also finds that these processes occur within a wider gender-unequal context in which gendered norms skew the presence of men and women in different sectors, and in which wider exclusions encourage women into platform work but lead them to experience greater precarity and dependency than men on that work. For example, women on average earn less than men because they work demonstrably fewer hours. This also limits the purported flexibility of platform work for women workers and denies them a pay premium to reflect their generally higher levels of education. While experienced by only a minority of women workers surveyed, gender-discriminatory cancellations, complaints and abuse were reported. The paper ends with recommendations for actions to address gender inequalities in platform work, and reflections on future research.

With the spread of monetization features like tipping and paid subscriptions, social media increasingly incorporates financial transactions and blurs the boundaries between social and parasocial relationships. While research documents how creators and audiences navigate economic interactions, there has been little attention to the role of platforms, particularly outside of Western contexts. We leverage the case of Pocket48, the custom mobile application for Chinese pop idol girl group SNH48, to investigate how platforms infrastructure asymmetrical relationships and the implications for both cultural production and online sociality. Based on an ethnographically-informed walkthrough analysis, we argue that the app employs two primary strategies for channeling fan-idol relationships: underclassifying interactions and invoking the aesthetics of intimacy. To do so, we first expose how Pocket48's policies ambivalently construct the user and the relationship between idols and fans. Next, we show how the app's design cultivates an intimate environment and unobtrusively incorporates transactions. Finally, we discuss how idols customize app infrastructure and moderate transactional functions to guide fans toward desired affective states. We conclude by introducing the concept of parasocial media, defined as platforms that feature (1) asymmetrical relationships between different classes of users, (2) tiered access to content and/or communication, and (3) tools to directly monetize relationships. Parasocial media platforms infrastructure relational work, helping media personas facilitate and financially exploit intimacy with their fans. Yet, as the case of Pocket48 attests, monetizing fan support is compatible with and can even strengthen the position of traditional industry actors.

Despite significant interest in the influence of digital platforms, we still lack a theoretically grounded understanding of why platformization processes and outcomes differ across contexts. In this article, we address this gap by developing a field-theoretical framework that conceptualizes platformization as a field-level transformation process shaped by the structural conditions of strategic action fields (SAFs), including actor constellations, patterns of interaction and mutual awareness, and shared understandings about purposes, power relations, and rules. Empirically, we present a comparative analysis of platformization processes in three business fields – logistics, mechanical component manufacturing, and orthopaedic technology – drawing on 89 interviews, survey data, and ethnographic materials. Our findings show that platformization is limited by the specific structural conditions of business fields. These include the organizational complexity and heterogeneity of user firms that curtail standardized solutions, the long-standing relational networks that reduce intermediation opportunities, the importance of domain-specific experiential knowledge that platforms struggle to replicate, the strong bargaining position of users and complementors, and the complexity of formal and informal regulation. These conditions result in distinct platformization processes that diverge from the ‘winner-takes-all’ dynamics observed in consumer-facing fields. Instead of platform dominance, based on strong network and lock-in effects, we identify outcomes such as marginal and partial platformization and even platform shutout. Platforms remain confined to niche segments, coexist with incumbents, or are absorbed into existing structures. Overall, the article contributes to platform studies by shifting the analytical focus from platform-centric explanations to the broader socioeconomic contexts in which platforms are embedded. It highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of platformization that accounts for variation across fields and challenges generic claims about the dominance of platform organizations across society.

This paper extends previous empirical and theoretical research by applying a critical analysis to the recent discourse of “spatial computing,” a term used by Apple Inc. in the launch of the Apple Vision Pro headset. We focus primarily on advertisements and other official videos used to promote and communicate the value(s) of Apple's inaugural “spatial computer,” and how this spatiality is mediated through the hardware and software of the Apple Vision Pro. With techno-utopian visions of daily life that belie Apple's broader platform politics, we argue that Apple's promotional content reveals sociocultural, embodied, material, spatial, and other imaginaries of extended reality that present Apple's novel mediations and data capture as normal and desirable for users who are framed as affluent, able-bodied tech enthusiasts participating in a digital economy that blurs work and leisure.

This online ethnographic study explores the nature of online work by Nigerian X (formerly Twitter) influencers through their adaptation of the platform's socio-technical features and affective labour. Two interconnected observations are advanced. First, influencers’ practices hinge on relevance, one that draws on the limited repertoire of platform affordances available. These practices are employed before or alongside their engagement with affective labour and identity entrepreneurship. Second, the immateriality of influencership and practices adopted when influencers lose relevance contribute to understanding their platform-based technical labour and online influence. These findings, therefore, suggest that the practices of building popularity and influence online extend beyond affective labour, which dominates the existing literature. This research relies on 15 in-depth interviews with influencers, media agencies, and representatives of corporate organisations, including an observation of their online activities. Particular attention is paid to research ethics, positionality, and data collection, management and processing. This study contributes new insights into the influencer culture on social media in Nigeria and Africa.

Mobile games are released through crowded app store platforms where competition is intense, and discoverability is a critical problem. In this environment, attracting new users is increasingly driven by advertising. This article examines one prominent format: playable ads, interactive advertisements embedded within mobile games. This article reports on a study of 100 unique playables collected from iOS games, analysing their characteristics, content and interface design. We show how circulation, understood as the movement of users between apps, is structured through the temporal and affective techniques of playable ad design, often in ethically problematic ways, while also conditioned by broader industrial dynamics such as the heavy ad spending of large game app developers and publishers. We argue that the ability to circulate constitutes a form of circulation power and that discoverability in digital games is fundamentally tied to this capacity.

Antifat bias engenders systemic harms for fat people ranging from bullying and harassment to discrimination and social inequities. Social media platforms have afforded the fat liberation movement essential tools for their efforts to ensure the rights, freedoms, and respect for people of all sizes. Yet, platforms also tend to reinforce and exacerbate longstanding structural inequities, rendering them both sites of empowerment and ongoing struggle. We conducted a qualitative study to understand the challenges social media poses for fat users aligned with the fat liberation movement, particularly focusing on TikTok. We conducted interviews (n = 16) with creators and consumers of fat liberation content online and analyzed TikTok videos in this genre (n = 204). We found experiences suggestive of an antifat bias embedded in and coproduced by TikTok's user culture, algorithmic systems, and policies. Interviewees and TikTok videos highlighted an unevenness in the visibility of fat liberation content relative to other content, antifat bullying and harassment, algorithmic recommendation of antifat content, and stifling expectations for fat creators. Informed by what fat activists and scholars call the “good fatty,” we suggest this ingrained antifat bias urges socially sanctioned performances of fatness on TikTok. Our findings corroborate existing work that casts doubts on the capacity for policy and design tweaks to rectify platformized systemic inequities. We affirm the need for a more radical rethinking of platform governance.

Platform-mediated labour is rapidly transforming African economies, expanding opportunities yet exacerbating precarity. This paper develops an empirical typology of heterogeneous platform worker experiences in Sub-Saharan Africa, grounded in interviews with 55 labourers across transportation, domestic services, IT and creative sectors in Rwanda, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Integrating neo-Marxist concepts of dispossession with postcolonial perspectives on enduring North-South domination reveals nuanced differences in autonomy constraints, income volatility, rating dependence and peripheral exclusion across five worker segments: high-skilled independents, low-skilled dependents, aspiring entrepreneurials, established entrepreneurials and discouraged peripherals. Findings show that high-skilled independents navigate autonomy and instability on global freelancing platforms while facing discrimination. Low-skilled dependents experience exploitative algorithms dictating terms of participation. Aspiring entrepreneurials leverage platforms strategically to launch startups. Established entrepreneurials transition from precarious work to launch equitable local platforms. Meanwhile, discouraged peripherals are denied access by opaque vetting. This typology provides traction to tailor protections addressing decent work deficits concentrated among particular groups.

In this short commentary, I suggest the term “paraplatform” as a means of expanding the purview of platform studies. The hope is that this conceptual term may open different analytic routes to platform histories and geographies; different formations of the platform society; different objects; and different lineages informing platforms and platform capitalism.

Webcam sex platforms, operating at the margins of the digital economy, face instability on both sides of their multisided markets due to the flexibility of platform labor, infrastructural exclusion, and cultural stigma. This paper examines a non-monopolistic webcam sex industry, in which platforms seek stability and “quality control” by building strategic third-party partnerships with traffic providers on the demand side and labor intermediaries (studios) on the supply side. Drawing on fieldwork at European and US-based industry events spanning 4 years and 43 interviews with platform and studio operators, marketers, and other expert informants, the analysis traces how these partnerships affect platform competition in a saturated, global, multi-platform ecosystem. First, it details industry structure and how adult livestreaming platforms acquire traffic despite tight restrictions, through niche ad networks and affiliate marketing. Second, it turns to the supply side and analyzes platform–studio relationships that outsource performer recruitment and retention, offering the platform workforce stability largely financed from the cut of performer earnings. The paper contributes to platform ecosystem research as well as online sex work scholarship, provides a case study of a unique platform industry and its partnerships, and demonstrates how the competitive platform strategies shape the conditions of an intersectionally precarious labor force.

Data interoperability—or standardized data sharing and use across organizational boundaries—is central to the production of value from big data. Using emerging health data regulations in the United States as a case study, this commentary demonstrates the importance of interoperability as a fulcrum in the governance of data-driven value production in the platform economy. Specifically, I explore how data governance of interoperability data governance: (1) is a foundational enabler of value production from data; (2) shapes processes of value production toward particular ends; and (3) intervenes in the accumulation of power through data.

#BamaRushTok is a yearly viral event in which young women at the University of Alabama audition for spots in gender-specific social clubs (sororities). As a researcher working at the University of Alabama, I was uniquely situated in this viral phenomenon. I quickly became the expert called upon to explain this trend. However, being on the periphery of a viral event from my standpoint—social media researcher, lifelong resident of the U.S. South, tenure-track academic education—problematized everything I knew about the self and the research as I became subject, object, and spectator. Through this highly personal and reflexive digital autoethnography, I explore how I experienced context collisions—something normally thought of as collapsed audiences but invoked by me to explore what happens when researchers become physically entangled in the digital worlds they study. I experienced being subject, object, and spectator of these context collisions in three ways: At times I was in control; at times I was used; and at times I could only stand back and watch. My experience mirrored the visibility and precarity experienced by the girls of #BamaRushTok and the creators I have made a career out of studying. This speaks to the broader neoliberal conditions that structure platforms and American higher education. This work also underscores the importance of autoethnography as a valuable but underutilized method in Internet Studies research, as it is a way for those studying digital spaces to reach inside of themselves and understand vulnerable and liminal social media experiences.

Digital content creation is a growing area of labour in Canada. Alongside the development of this labour market, it has been reported there are rising issues of harassment, racism, and racial representation. Research germane to this area has provided rich qualitative accounts of how harassment and social oppression impact marginalized content creators. This study builds on this scholarly area to demonstrate quantitatively the ways in which harassment manifests in a Canadian setting. Using data from an online survey targeting Canadian content creators (N = 103), I specifically examine the incidence of harassment and racism among this population. Drawing on critical race theories, I argue that although online harassment is a widespread workplace hazard for content creators – regardless of identity, the consequences of this harassment are qualitatively different for those who have been historically marginalized. I expand on these findings to articulate how these impacts have downstream effects for marginalized creators, which may hinder their ability to sustain their labour in this environment. Finally, I situate these findings in the platformized environment within which these workplace hazards exist and problematize the arms-length approach that platforms take in regulating these hazards.

This article examines how Latin American third-party sellers on Mercado Libre—the region's largest e-commerce platform—internalize and manage risk through practices aligned with Neff's (2012) concept of venture labor. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with sellers based in Chile, we explore how individuals navigate economic precarity and algorithmic uncertainty by mobilizing specific strategies and resources. We identify three risk management strategies: financial, creative, and actuarial. The financial strategy frames platform work as an investment for achieving economic independence; the creative strategy emphasizes personal reinvention, branding, and visibility; and the actuarial strategy involves anticipating trends and ensuring long-term business viability. These strategies are shaped by platform-specific conditions. Sellers view Mercado Libre as safer and more legitimate than alternatives like Facebook Marketplace, offering formalized transactions and greater visibility—yet also requiring constant adaptation to opaque algorithms and performance metrics. To support these strategies, sellers draw on a mix of formal and informal resources. These include official training programs, YouTube tutorials, peer learning networks, and relationships with intermediaries. Networking—both online and in person—emerges as a key resource, helping sellers exchange knowledge, gain visibility, and mitigate uncertainty. This article makes three contributions to platform labor research. First, it updates the concept of venture labor by highlighting how algorithmic infrastructures shape risk-taking. Second, it shows how risk is being redefined in post-pandemic Latin America. Third, it situates venture labor in the Global South, emphasizing the cultural and institutional specificities that shape entrepreneurial labor on digital platforms like Mercado Libre.