Outline of chapters
The objective of this thesis is to explore the ways digital platforms, as actors acting in
tandem with human actors, are reconfiguring the political. In order to do this, the first
chapter of this thesis will explore how digital platforms constitute a new domain of privately-
owned public space. Executives of technology corporations have long presented their
platforms as spaces of public discussion and debate, with former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo
going as far as to call the platform a ―global town square‖ (Leetaru 2017). These analogies
are more than marketing strategies, though; defining digital platforms as public spaces also
implies particular legal protections for users and regulations that platform owners would
need to face, according to precedents set in the American courts. In the past several years,
there have been many controversies surrounding ―free speech‖ on digital platforms, with
President Trump himself accusing platform owners of having content moderation policies
that are biased against politically conservative viewpoints (Roose 2019). However, as this
chapter will argue, digital platforms have altered the materiality of what constitutes speech
in the first place, bringing a new techno-economic formation into being. Thus, when
considering debates over free speech online, concepts such as ―free speech‖ and a
―public forum‖ do not refer to transhistorical, immutable categories; instead they are terms
that express a particular actor‘s rendering of a specific arrangement of technological and
human actors.
The second chapter will look at the political economy of platforms and the new types
of actors and sets of relations they give rise to. The chapter will argue that as privately-owned
public spaces, digital platforms have brought new relations of power and domination into
being, where founders of platforms exercise near absolute authority over not only the
corporate apparatus of their companies, but also the lives of their millions of platform users
and their daily interactions with each other. While these company executives seek foremost
to maximize the profitability of their platforms through extracting user data, the relations
between platform owners and platform users is understood by both parties in terms that
exceed these solely economic relations. Instead, executives‘ need to regulate behavior on
their platform in order to maximize profitability leads to new relations of governance, in
which platform users have become ―citizens‖ of the platform. In this relationship of
governance, users give up certain rights, foremost their right to privacy, in exchange for
others. As this chapter will explore, platforms are productive of a new form of trackable and
manipulable social capital in the form of likes, retweets, views, etc. that users can monetize
for their own personal gain (Schwarz 2019, p.
135). Their rights to this platform-specific social capital is contingent on their behavior as a
―good citizen‖ of the platform.
Finally, after exploring the formation of new relationships between platform owners
and individual users, the third chapter will turn to how digital platforms change the way
collectivities come into being, impacting long standing political institutions that absorb
these collectivities. Taking the DSA as a case study, the chapter will analyze how digital
platforms are integrated into new repertoires of political action which, rather than being
neutral tools for human actors to adopt at will, actively shape what it means to be a member
of a collectivity, in some ways reflecting how ―the medium is the message‖ (Chadwick 2007,
p. 286). Accounts of the DSA‘s massive growth since 2016 attribute it to the popularity of the
Sanders‘ campaign, backlash against Trump‘s victory, and highly publicized victories of
other democratic socialists in the congressional midterm elections in 2018, most notably
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York. DSA members have credited social media sites like
Twitter for making socialist discourse accessible to a wider audience, allowing more people
to find out about the organization (Barnes
2020). While these factors scratch the surface of the DSA‘s transformation, a deeper look
suggests that digital platforms play an integral role in bringing new organizational structures
and modes of political action into being. As this chapter will argue, the forms of digital action
individuals adopt inform how collectivities are assembled and sustained, bringing ―fringe‖
organizations like the DSA into closer proximity with mainstream institutions and
campaigns, lending it greater visibility through digital interpersonal networks to actors who
otherwise might not have been exposed to the organization and its ideals. Thus, through
these chapters, this thesis aims to illustrate how digital platforms reconfigure the political,
bringing new formations of
actor-networks into being.
Chapter 1:
Making Sense of the Digital “Town Square”
Overview
Social media companies have long presented their platforms as spaces for
connecting people, facilitating open and free discussion, and overall providing a service that
is for the public good. Users of digital platforms often express their belief in their right to use
their social media accounts to express their political opinions, implicitly and often explicitly
invoking their First Amendment rights to free speech, despite the fact that First Amendment
protections generally apply to actions the government can and cannot take to restrict speech
that takes place on public property. Furthermore, laws regulating social media companies‘
responsibility to moderate content on their platforms give corporations broad latitude to
enact content moderation policies that do not adhere to First Amendment standards. While
there is legal precedent for treating some privately-owned property as public space,
analogous to corporate-owned towns , and therefore subject to free speech protections,
recent court decisions have been ambivalent about where digitally privately-owned public
spaces stand.
Rather than seeking to settle debates about the role social media play in society--
whether they should be treated as public forums for free speech, how they should be
regulated by government, and to what extent corporations can ―censor‖ users‘ speech--
this chapter will view these controversies as windows into viewing how digital platforms, far
from being neutral forums or infrastructure, become integrated into chains of action that
alter how terms like ―free speech‖ and ―public space‖ themselves are materially
composed. Different human actors such as executives of technology companies,
legislators, judges, and platform users deploy these terms in their attempt to render their
own account of what digital platforms are dominant in relation to others‘ diverging accounts.
Thus, these debates actually constitute a new arena of politics where these terms, rather
than referring to immutable categories and concepts, refer to constantly changing techno-
economic materiality. The gap between old conceptions of these terms and this new
materiality is productive of a new arena of politics, where new actors are in the process of
coming into being, as will be sketched briefly by the events below.
Diamond and Silk go to Congress
Sisters Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson sat in front of the House
Judiciary
Committee on April 26, 2018. For them, it was the next step in an escalating fight with
Facebook, specifically its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, over what they claimed was ―censorship‖
of their popular page that features political commentary enthusiastically supporting Donald
Trump.
More famously known as the duo ―Diamond and Silk,‖ the sisters had gone viral for their
support for the Trump campaign in 2016 and their vocal backing of him following his election.
Since September 2017, they had been in correspondence with Facebook about its ―bias
censorship and discrimination against‖ the Diamond and Silk brand and page, resulting in
greatly reduced page reach, according to a statement they posted on their Facebook page.
This correspondence came to a head on April 5, 2018, when the company sent an email to
the sisters allegedly stating that Facebook‘s policy team ―has came [sic] to the conclusion
that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community‖ (Diamond
and Silk 2018).
The sisters‘ accusations against Facebook rest on the claim that the company had
violated their right to free expression, a right that most Americans assume as a constitutional
guarantee. Accusing Facebook of ―deliberate bias censorship and discrimination,‖ the
sisters implicitly allude to this guarantee, asserting their right to express support of Donald
Trump. However, while invoking violations of their right to free political expression, their
claims also largely rested on the status of Facebook as a private company and the harm its
―censorship‖ had allegedly caused to Diamond and Silk, not as individuals with free speech
rights, but as a ―brand and page.‖ This perspective is summed up in the fifth item on a bullet-
point list in which the sisters enumerate their complaints: ―If our content and brand was so
unsafe to the community, why is the option for us to boost our content and spend money
with FB to enhance our brand page still available? Maybe FB should give us a refund since
FB censored our reach‖ (Diamond and Silk 2018). Thus, Facebook‘s digital platform had
become integrated into the sisters‘ seemingly dual roles as citizens enjoying certain
Constitutional rights on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a brand entitled to
compensation for entering into what was perceived as an unfair deal with another business.
At the time, the sisters‘ complaints largely reflected the attitudes of Republican
officials and conservative pundits towards social media. While Democrats in the hearing
referred to the proceedings as ―stupid and ―ridiculous‖ (Robertson 2018), Republican
Representative Marsha
Blackburn defended the sisters‘ claims, arguing that technology companies do indeed target
conservative content for censorship. Blackburn had experienced her own issues with social
media. In October 2017, Twitter had not allowed her to promote her campaign launch video
due to ―inflammatory‖ language concerning Planned Parenthood (she boasts about her
track record of
―stopping the sale of baby body parts‖), though the company later reversed its decision.
Similar to Diamon and Silk‘s case, the controversy centered not on whether or not Blackburn
could post such content on Twitter, but whether or not she could pay to push the video to
greater publicity, though the issue was framed around allegations of censorship and
discrimination, a subtle difference that refocused the debate on protected free expression
rights instead of business complaints.
Fast-forwarding a year later in July 2019, Trump hosted a social media summit at the
White House for right-wing personalities to air their grievances against technology
companies.
While controversial figures such as James O‘Keefe of Project Veritas, Qanon conspiracy
theorist Bill Mitchell, and people from the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA were
invited, representatives from Twitter and Facebook were ostensibly not (Roose 2019). Two
months before the summit, the Trump administration had launched an online form to collect
stories from people who had experienced unjust ―censorship‖ on social media platforms.
The tool, hosted by Typeform, allowed users to submit screenshots and links to the offending
content, and write a brief description of the disciplinary action taken against them. The
Typeform webpage, though no longer accepting submissions, still reads: ―SOCIAL MEDIA
PLATFORMS should advance FREEDOM OF SPEECH. Yet too many Americans have seen
their accounts suspended, banned, or fraudulently reported for unclear "violations" of user
policies‖ (White House Typeform 2020).
Despite the summit attendees‘ outrage at being ―silenced‖ on social media platforms, a
New York
Times reporter noted the irony of complaining about persecution from the ―cushy perch of
a
White House summit‖ (Roose 2019).
As journalists have pointed out, when Trump and conservatives complain about their
freedom of speech being violated, what they are actually talking about is the extent to which
their speech is able to reach a larger audience on social media platforms. In other words,
critics have argued that while conservatives have the right to say what they want on social
media, they do not have the right to have the visibility of that content boosted by Facebook‘s
and Twitter‘s algorithms so that it appears in more people‘s newsfeeds (Diresta 2018).
However, what their complaints do shed light on is the way in which the very concept of
―speech‖ itself has been drastically reconfigured by digital platforms and their constitutive
algorithms. Though made distinct from each other, ―speech‖ and ―reach‖ are intricately
intertwined. Does speech on social media mean anything if it does not reach anyone to hear
it? Yet ―reach‖ is not reflective of a naturally occurring phenomenon in the offline world.
Rather, it is algorithmically determined, with algorithms being engineered by employees at
Twitter and Facebook and refined with continuous user input. Thus, not only has the nature
of ―speech‖ been transformed, but the public space in which it is occurring is now largely
privately-owned digital platforms governed by technology companies and their algorithms.
This illustrates that these debates are not only about social media users‘ rights to freedom
of speech; at the core, these debates are about what constitutes ―speech‖ and ―freedom‖
in the first place. The conflicting attempts of various actors to fit old concepts to a new
technological material reality are productive of such political debates.
The following sections of this chapter will explore the debate around ―free speech‖
on digital platforms in order to show how the concepts of ―public space‖ and ―speech‖
have been reconfigured and (re)engineered by digital platforms. As the story of Diamond and
Silk illustrates, the role of social media platforms in promoting free expression and
democracy is highly contested, with users, corporate executives, and government officials
divided over what exactly platforms are and how the technology and corporate parts should
be governed. Rather than referring to immutable categories, the concepts of free speech,
public space, and the speaker as a political subject reflect a specific techno-economic
materiality that is composed of many contingent and constantly moving parts, including
platforms themselves, the algorithms that constitute them, platform users, and government
policies and regulations. Thus, the gap between this new material reality and the old
conceptualizations of such terms is generative of a new kind of politics, in which public
debate over how to fit this reality into old categories plays out at the highest levels of
government, as well as between users over digital platforms. As demonstrated by the story
of Diamond and Silk, these two realms have also become interconnected, as seemingly
disparate figures such as the president and obscure social media personalities connect in
the offline world to make their case for ―free speech‖ rights. This shows the ways in which
digital platforms flatten the topology of society by rendering elements seemingly separated
by spheres, layers, or levels actually quite close to one another when their connections are
examined (Latour 1996, p. 371).
In order to illustrate these points, this chapter will first show how social media have
been constructed as the natural places for political expression, emphasizing the role of law
and government policy in doing this and then briefly discussing how technology companies
themselves perpetuate this discourse. Secondly, this chapter will give an overview of court
decisions and legal precedents for free speech protections within privately-owned ―public‖
spaces, revealing the ambiguous relationship between how social media are constructed
and how they are actually regulated. After that, the chapter will explore how digital platforms
are integrated into a new political arena in which new types of actors and action are made
possible.
Finally, the gap between this new reality and the old understanding of terms like ―free
speech‖ and ―public space‖ will be explored, demonstrating how this gap produces a new
kind of politics in which different actors, from tech executives, social media users, and
politicians are actively attempting to define and stabilize their positions and identities in
relation to the others.
Constructing Social Media as a New Public Forum
Popular understandings of social media platforms as spaces for open and free
discussion stem from technology executive‘s own efforts to market their platforms as social
infrastructure or digital town squares, digital spaces analogous to physical spaces where
people congregate to debate matters of public concern. Such efforts are also rooted in
democratizing discourse of the internet in general, which has in part been constituted by
scholars‘ own attempts to study and theorize digital platforms. Attempts to analogize digital
platforms to physical public spaces points to a mismatch between old conceptions of public
spaces, their connotations, and their associated First Amendment protections, and how
digital platforms are actually governed, by the companies that own them, judicial
precedents, and legislative regulations.
For many scholars the internet in general and social media in particular offered new
potential for democratization due to the technologies‘ ability to facilitate conversation
across broader swathes of society, as compared to the age of mass media. In his seminal
book, The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler (2006) discusses the new networked public
sphere, where the internet allows more individuals to communicate their viewpoints to many
others. The networked public sphere, according to Benkler (2006, p.10), encourages
decentralized approaches to political participation and organization, and the individuals
communicating are less likely to be corrupted by money, compared to mass media. Similarly,
Manuel Castells (2008,
p. 90) notes the mass self-communication that occurs in this networked public sphere
entails many-to-many sending and receiving of information that often bypasses mass media
and government control. For him, new information and communication technologies have
led to the rise of a global civil society, in which harnessing the power of public opinion
through internet networks is the most effective way to broaden political participation
(Castells 2008, p. 90).
Access to conversation is vital for building a strong public sphere, made vastly easier by the
affordances of social media, according to Clay Shirky (2011, p. 32). Thus, it is the
responsibility of the government to promote a free internet policy in which social media can
foster open discussions among citizens (Shirky 2011, p. 32). These approaches to studying
digital communications technologies view them as social infrastructure for channeling
interpersonal relations, thus leading to broader possibilities for fostering democracy.
While these accounts advance knowledge on how digital platforms have made
greater connectivity among once disparate individuals possible, the point that they miss is
that these platforms fundamentally change the types of conversations that are possible, and
the ways in which the individuals having these conversations are transformed as platforms
become inextricably integrated into their modes of action. As demonstrated by the debates
unfolding at the legislative level in the United States, digital platforms are entities that enter
the equation in their own right, technological forces that drive and steer action on the one
hand, and must be made sense of by competing human actors on the other. Contrary to
concepts of the ―networked public sphere‖ (Benkler 2006), in which communications
technologies connect individuals, these debates about the status of platforms show that
they are not neutral infrastructure for channeling pure human relations. In fact, platforms
themselves enter the meta-discourse, with technology executives actively shaping
understandings of what platforms are, and as a result, the legal implications for corporations
and users of these platforms. Drawing heavily on the democratizing discourse of the internet,
of which the above scholarship is a part, corporate executives attempt to construct their
platforms as open and free communicative spaces. However, as will be shown, these
accounts are always open-ended and contested as platforms give rise to a new kind of
politics and political actors.
Drawing on the democratizing discourse on the internet in general (Gillespie 2010, p.
352), social media companies like Twitter and Facebook discursively construct their
platforms as online spaces analogous to public forums, promoting these platforms as
communicative spaces that bring people together. As Gillespie (2010, p. 350) has written,
the label ―platform‖ as applied to these sites draws not only on the word‘s computational
definition (i.e. a program from which to run other applications), but other connotations of the
word that suggest social media platforms are ―progressive and egalitarian arrangements‖
that provide users the opportunity to communicate, interact, or conduct business. Thus, the
label ―platform‖ becomes a ―discursive resting point‖ that misrepresents how these
companies actively shape public discourse about their platforms (Gillespie 2010, p. 349).
Importantly, painting their platforms as tools for public good is necessary for these
companies to pursue their underlying commercial goals. In the wake of ―fake news‖
controversy surrounding the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg rolled out a new mission
statement for Facebook the following year that sought to ―give people the power to build
community and bring the world closer together (Constine 2017). Similarly, former Twitter
CEO
Dick Costolo once spoke of his vision to make the platform a ―global town square‖ similar
to the ancient Roman Agora, where information exchange was unfiltered, and news came
directly from the people living it (Leetaru 2017). On its investor relations page, Twitter states
its business and revenue will always strive to ―improve -- and not detract from -- a free and
global conversation‖ (Twitter 2020). Through this discourse, social media companies
present their platforms as spaces for people to meet and discuss topics that are important
to the general public, serving a role analogous to the role public squares and common
physical spaces have historically served in advancing citizens‘ constitutional right to free
expression.
Conceptualizations of social media platforms in this way also implicitly draw on
historic notions of what a ―public forum‖ is and what a public forum‘s function for the
greater good of society has been conceived as. In the context of American legal doctrine, a
―public forum‖ usually refers to government-owned property such as parks, streets, and
sidewalks, where individuals are generally free to exercise their First Amendment right to free
expression. On such property, individuals have greater protection from censorship than on
private property, where certain restrictions on speech may be imposed (Hudson 2020).
Public forum doctrine can be traced back to a case in 1939, Hague v. Committee for
Industrial Organization, in which Justice
Owen J. Roberts wrote in his ruling:
―Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been
held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for
purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and
discussing public questions. Such use of the streets and public places has,
from ancient times, been a part of the privileges, immunities, rights, and
liberties of citizens‖ (Hudson 2020).
While the courts have ruled that the government can place reasonable restrictions on
speech based on time, manner, and place, the government cannot restrict speech on
content-based judgements. In other words, the government cannot block speech based on
the message it is delivering (Hudson 2020). Generally, however, the view of the American
courts has been that public forums are essential for the maintenance of robust public
debate, which the First
Amendment is meant to promote and protect.
Thus, social media companies draw on the democratizing discourse of the internet
as well as traditional legal conceptions of the ―public forum‖ in order to construct their
platforms as places of open, free expression, analogous to an online town square. These
statements are also the way social media companies ―sell‖ their services to users; the main
utility for the average person is the platform‘s ability to connect that person with other users.
Articulating their services in this way also allows these companies to divert attention from
the commercial incentives that underlie the platforms‘ designs, most notably the imperative
to collect users‘ personal data to sell to advertisers. However, as the debate unfolding at the
highest levels of government and among platform users themselves show, there are huge
gaps between old conceptions of terms like ―free speech‖ and ―public space.‖ The aim of
this chapter is not to argue that there is a ―right‖ or ―wrong‖ definition of these terms.
Instead, as different actors deploy these terms in debates about and constructions of digital
platforms, it becomes clear that terms like free speech and public space are constantly
shifting categories, referring to changing techno-economic material realities that
continuously must be made sense of. This gap between old concepts and new
configurations is generative of a new kind of politics, in which various actors: lawmakers,
corporate executives, platform users, and even the president himself, are attempting to
render their own interpretations of these categories stable in relation to others‘
interpretations. Thus, to further illustrate the gap between old understandings of these terms
and this new materiality, the following section will explore how American courts have sought
to define digital platforms, and the consequences this has had for the rights and
responsibilities afforded to technology companies and everyday platform users.
Digital Platform as an Online Company Town?
There is much tension between this image of social media platforms as public forums
and the legal status of these platforms that determine the ensuing protections they and their
users enjoy. Several legal scholars have made the case for the courts to apply public forum
doctrine to sites like Facebook and Twitter, while court decisions have often been ambiguous
on the issue.
At the heart of this debate is, if treated as a public forum, then social media companies‘
terms of service and content moderation policies would need to comply with First
Amendment protections, which some argue would vastly undermine their ability to remove
hate speech and misinformation, or how, at the root of it, First Amendment doctrine should
be adapted in general for the internet age (Beausoleil 2019, p. 2143).
Legal scholars have also argued that there is strong precedent in case law for treating
social media in particular like town squares, or in other words, as public spaces for free
expression despite being owned by private companies, reasoning that as platforms like
Facebook and Twitter ―thrust themselves into the public light… they discard their private
rights‖ (Everett 2018, p. 122). This precedent comes from the landmark case Marsh v.
Alabama (1946), in which the Court ruled a corporate town, though privately owned, fulfilled
a ―public function,‖ thus endowing it with the responsibilities of government (Puetz 2015,
p. 397). Because of this, the company could not forbid a resident from distributing religious
materials in the town, as it had tried to do, because this was a violation of that resident‘s
First Amendment protections. From this, legal scholars have reasoned that Facebook plays
the role of an online corporate town, a place where users can create a social identity with
which they interact with other social identities. Within this online corporate town, social
identities also encounter everything from entertainment, business, news and more (Puetz
2015, p. 403). In this analogy, platform users occupy the space of employee-residents in the
corporate town because their social identities not only inhabit it, but their activity also
generates data that Facebook extracts for profit (Puetz 2015,
p. 403). The conclusion to be drawn from classifying Facebook as a corporate town (and
therefore a public forum) is that its content moderation policies must not restrict its users‘
First Amendment rights, a point in itself that has generated much controversy both among
scholars, legislators, and the general public.
However, the courts have been ambivalent when it comes to classifying social media
platforms as public forums. The Supreme Court ruling in Manhattan Community Access
Corp. v. Halleck in June 2019, though not directly discussing social media, was seen to have
potential ramifications for social media companies‘ responsibilities under First Amendment
law
(―Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck‖ 2019, p. 289). The question at issue in
the case was whether a privately operated community access television channel is
considered a state actor, and therefore can be sued on First Amendment grounds (Higgins
2019). As some noted, if the Court had ruled that it could be considered a state actor, the
decision could potentially be applied to social media and thus advance Republicans‘
allegations of censorship on social media. However, the Court ruled that the nonprofit
operating the community access channel was a private actor, and thus had no constraints
on its editorial discretion (Kavanaugh 2019). Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh
wrote, ―Moreover, a private entity such as MNN who opens its property for speech by others
is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor‖ (Kavanaugh 2019). While the ruling
was narrowly applied to public access television, scholars have noted the unclear
implications for future cases regarding free speech on social media
(―Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck‖ 2019).
Furthermore, existing laws that regulate social media companies have become the
subject of debate among legislators due to their perceived inability to effectively hold these
companies accountable for what is posted on their platforms, again marking a contradiction
between how social media are popularly conceived and constructed by the companies
themselves and their legal status. The famous ―26 words that created the internet‖ are
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, which states that, "no
provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or
speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (Bolson 2016,
p. 3). Congress‘ original intent for the law was to encourage interactive computer service
providers to moderate content on their platforms without fear of being sued for content
posted by third parties on their platforms (Pagano 2018, p. 532). This concern stemmed from
previous cases that had suggested if interactive computer services attempted to moderate
content, they would assume the role of a
―publisher‖ exercising editorial discretion, and thus be liable for every message posted on
their platform (Bolson 2016, p. 5). Thus, the intended purpose of this law was to encourage
these companies to actively monitor and remove offensive content, suggesting that these
companies had the right to censor users‘ speech according to their own policies. In fact,
some have argued that the explicit purpose of the law was to encourage content moderation
by freeing companies from the fear of being sued if they began monitoring posts (Robertson
2019). However, after the passage of Section 230, the case Zeran v. America Online, Inc.
(1997) had the opposite effect by setting a precedent that broadly immunized computer
service providers from liability for any content posted by third parties (Pagano 2018, p. 522).
Debates over how broad of immunity platforms should enjoy, as well as the outdated status
of Section 230 have become hotly contested, with technology companies clinging to the
legal protection the label of ―platform‖ provides them, and opponents claiming these
companies must face greater accountability for how their platforms are used (Guynn 2020).
Thus, the intricacies of Facebook, Twitter, and other digital platforms‘ legal status is
far from settled. It is unclear to what extent they should legally be treated as public forums,
though both Democratic and Republican politicians have been calling for technology
companies to be held to greater accountability for how their platforms are run and how
content is moderated. What this debate reveals is that there is a wide gap between social
media as public spaces, popularly constructed as such, as well as in the function they serve,
and the actual ways in which they operate and are regulated. This gap is productive of a new
kind of politics, where the efforts of each actor involved to render their own understanding
of digital platforms hegemonic is constitutive of new political actions and discourses that
did not formerly exist.
Deploying Digital Platforms as Multiple
It is worth noting that while debates over how to regulate social media platforms and
how to hold companies accountable have been unfolding, there is little challenge raised to
the underlying structure of a privately-owned public space. Senator Ted Cruz, a vocal
Republican lawmaker in the crusade against perceived censorship of conservative voices
online, laid out his complaints and a plan of action in a letter to the Federal Trade
Commission, co-authored with Senator Josh Hawley in which they call for greater
transparency in Google, Facebook, and Twitter‘s algorithms and decision-making (Cruz and
Hawley 2019). Stopping short of suggesting alternatives to privately-owned public spaces,
they instead request that the FTC investigates these companies (Cruz and Hawley 2019). On
the Democrats‘ side, legislators have shown varying support for breaking up ―big tech,‖ with
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren calling for stricter antitrust enforcement than
others (Culliford 2020). Generally, calls for better regulation of hate speech and
misinformation online are predicated on technology companies taking an even more active
role in moderating content and enforcing company policies. In the case of Diamond and Silk,
their allegations of Facebook‘s censorship again do not take issue with the fact that the
platform is privately owned. In fact, a major part of their complaint centers on their assertion
that Facebook did not properly carry out its role as a regulator by unfairly censoring their
page, questioning the company‘s ability to adhere to its own policies and community
standards. Thus, there is a level of tacit acceptance for privately-owned public spaces in the
form of digital platforms, which rather than representing an inherent state of reality are a
specific techno-economic material assemblage, at the same time both highly contingent
and purposefully engineered and discursively constructed by tech companies for their own
profit. Thus, debates over how to match old concepts of public space and the freedoms
associated with it to this new private-public forum generate a new kind of politics, political
actors, and speech.
The gap between the legal status of digital platforms and their use and construction
as sites of public discourse has created a new and distinct formation of privately-owned
public spaces in which public debate is steered and its parameters are set by platform
owners. Despite appealing to an image that paints platforms as empowering spaces of
discussion and expression, upon closer examination it becomes evident that technology
companies themselves do not necessarily claim to be ―neutral‖ channels; the discussions
and debates that users are empowered to have must always occur within standards that are
implemented top-down by Facebook and
Twitter. For example, when Jack Dorsey laid out Twitter‘s mission of developing a ―systemic
framework to help encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking,‖ he
explicitly continues to detail the metrics by which the ―health‖ of conversation would be
measured, which had been developed by two other articifical intelligence and data science
startups (Dorsey 2019). Similarly, Zuckerberg‘s mission of ―building a global community‖
on
Facebook made the case that the change would start ―local‖ with everyday users, though
he goes on to discuss the Meaningful Communities project, which would be driven by
improved artificial intelligence that could recommend better Groups for users to join
(Zuckerberg 2017). These instances represent examples of what van Dijck (2013, p. 12) has
called technology companies ―making sociality technical,‖ in which actions that are
conceptualized as ―social,‖ such as engaging in discussions or being a part of a community
are rendered formal, manageable, and manipulable by technology for the purpose of the
company‘s economic profit. This purposeful engineering of public space by private entities
represents a new social-technical-economic formation. The debate over how to identify and
govern this specific formation is constitutive of a new arena of politics, which has in turn
made possible new formations of speech and speaker.
Digital platforms and their constitutive algorithms transform the nature of the speaker
and speech in question by becoming an essential part of the articulation of both. Both the
computational workings of algorithms and what Taina Bucher (2017) has termed the
―algorithmic imaginary‖ have become integrated into the formation of political speech and
the speaker(s). As Bucher (2017, p. 31) explains, the algorithmic imaginary refers to ―the
ways in which people imagine, perceive and experience algorithms and what these
imaginations make possible.‖ This, for example, is manifested in Diamond and Silk‘s
accusations that Facebook is censoring their page through its algorithms, which led to their
high profile Congressional hearing. As demonstrated by their opening story, the algorithmic
imaginary was a powerful force that was generative of Congressional hearings, a White
House summit, and a slew of other ―real world‖ consequences. Actors did not need to have
access to ―the thing itself,‖ meaning knowledge of Facebook‘s actual codes, in order to
perceive it in a certain way (Bucher 2017, p. 32). On a computational level, algorithms that
drove and were driven by clicks, shares, and follows propelled Diamond and Silk to virality,
allowing their formerly obscure channel to explode in prominence to the point where they
became featured on the Trump campaign trail, guest commentators on Fox News, and
subjects of interviews at other mainstream outlets such as the Rolling Stone and CNN with
Don Lemon. Thus, algorithms have the power to steer and engineer action beyond their
respective platforms. In unpredictable ways, platforms also become integrated in chains of
action that span into the offline realm, demonstrating the way action is dislocated
throughout complex assemblages of actors. As Latour (2005, p. 55) puts it, there are
―simply different ways to make actors do things, the diversity of which is fully deployed
without having to sort in advance the ‗true‘ agencies from the ‗false‘ ones‖ (Latour 2005, p.
55). Thus, rather than seeking to adjudicate if Republicans‘ allegations against technology
companies are true, if they are based on genuine political convictions, or put forth for ulterior
motives, it becomes more insightful to analyze how algorithms, both in their computational
and imaginary capacity, are giving rise to new types of actors and agencies.
In order to fully grasp the ―effect‖ of digital platforms on politics, it is necessary to
open up the black box of the actor. Rather than viewing individuals acting as unified entities,
breaking them down into their constitutive chains of associations into which platforms are
integrated reveals the multiple forces operating behind the scenes to make the actor act in
certain ways. By this view, digital platforms can be seen as complex actors in their own right,
affecting chains of action just as much as the humans who create and use them. Thus, the
outcome of the new techno-economic formation of digital platforms is not a ―global town
square‖ or an online corporate town. The disjuncture between these terms and the new
techno-economic materiality of a privately-owned public space is productive of a new
political arena in which judges, legislators, platform users, and technology executives are
actively competing and contesting the management and governance of this arena. Thus,
these are analogies that various actors deploy in their struggle to render the new formation
stable, while the actual outcome is the new actornetworks themselves, which are
composed of individual users, algorithms in the computational and imaginary sense, varying
economic imperatives, and existing judicial and legislative structures.
Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated how the digital platform itself has become an integral
link in the chain of associations that makes up the speaker, speech, and public space
broadly conceived. The tension between the legal categorization of social media companies
as private entities and the construction of digital platforms as public spaces for debate and
free expression constitutes a new techno-economic materiality in which the actors in
question are constantly reacting and adapting to the others‘ efforts to render interpretation
of these categories stable. As this account has shown, this is less about different points of
view of what digital platforms are, as though they have an inherent nature outside of how
different actors perceive them and put them to use, but is rather a question of how digital
platforms themselves have ―been allowed to be deployed as multiple‖ (Latour 2005, p.
116). In this way, Facebook is both a public forum and a private company, and its status shifts
and is deployed in many, often diverging ways depending on whether the actor in question
is, say Mark Zuckerberg versus Diamond and Silk. Debates over these terms reflect the
contestation between different actors with different interests in their pursuit to re-engineer
what these terms are understood to mean. Thus, when considering debates over free speech
online, ―free speech‖ and the ―public forum,‖ rather than referring to immutable
categories are normative terms that express a particular rendering of a specific arrangement
of
technological and human actors.
Chapter 2
Social Capital and the Political Economy of Platforms
Overview
As privately-owned public spaces, discussed at length in the previous chapter, digital
platforms have given rise to new relations of power and domination, where technology
executives exercise authority not only over the corporate apparatus of their companies, but
also the lives of platform users and their daily interactions with each other. In economic
terms, many scholars have noted these dynamics of economic exploitation within the
greater context of capitalist processes. However, relations between platform owners and
platform users are understood by both parties in ways that exceed pure economic relations.
In order to maximize the profitability of their platforms, technology executives must actively
govern their users by policing and conditioning desirable behavior (Schwarz 2019, p. 119).
On the other side of this equation, platform users are then configured as economic actors in
their own right, able to capitalize on the social capital they accumulate on digital platforms.
The ability to convert likes, followers, views, retweets, and other concrete metrics into
monetary profits, access to traditionally powerful institutions, and other resources has led
to the a new actor, here referred to as a ―political entrepreneur,‖ who is able to commodify
not only political speech but the self. This platform ―self‖ is thus an economic actor and
political subject, exploited and governed by platform owners yet also exercising and
demanding certain rights associated with membership in the platform community.
This chapter will trace the formation of these new actors: the autocratic corporate
executive and the platform citizen-political entrepreneur, illustrating how these new
relations of governance, power, and domination are assembled. First, existing approaches
to the political economy of digital platforms will be reviewed, highlighting where these
critiques overlook the extra-economic relations that arise. After that, through expanding on
Weihe‘s (2017) formulation of ―founder primacy‖ (Weihe 2017), this chapter will examine
how the power of technology corporation executives is assembled, not just as an economic
force but also as a political one.
Then, the chapter will turn to the ―political entrepreneur,‖ revisiting the story of Diamond
and Silk in greater detail to sketch the relations of governance, power, and capitalization that
become possible as digital platforms are integrated into new chains of action. Finally, the
chapter will end by drawing some conclusions about these novel political-economic
formations and the relations of power that are carried out between them.
Beyond Exploitation and Extraction
Free labor, provided by platform users for platform owners, is a constitutive aspect of
the digital economy. As Terranova (2004, p. 74) has noted, the internet in general is animated
by ongoing technical and cultural labor that is immanent to the flows of network society.
Users‘ engagement with social media platforms represent a type of ―free‖ labor in that it is
both willingly given and non-compensated, despite the monetary value it generates for
technology corporations (Terranova 2004, p. 94). This free labor can also be conceptualized
as immaterial labor, which Hardt (1999, p. 94), drawing on Lazzarato (1996) defines as
―labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or
communication.‖ For example, these activities carried out over social media can include
filling out a user profile, uploading photos and videos, and liking content from other users,
all of which generate monetizable data points for technology companies, and, as noted, go
uncompensated for platform users (Cohen 2008, p. 8). Immaterial labor also produces
intangible products such as feelings of satisfaction and well-being, passion, and ―even a
sense of connectedness and community,‖ thus making production communicative,
affective, and ―elevated to the level of human relations,‖ although it occurs within a field
that is dominated by and immanent to capital (Hardt 1999, p. 6). As Cohen (2008, p. 7) puts
it, digital platforms are part of a longer, historical process of extensive commodification, or
in other words, ―the way in which market forces shape and re-shape life, entering spaces
previously untouched, or mildly touched, by capitalist social relations.‖ Importantly, this
process as carried out by digital platforms leads to the intensification and normalization of
constant surveillance by private companies (Cohen 2008, p. 8). Thus, as defined by the
Marxist critiques outlined above, the relationship between platform users and platform
owners is constitutive of a new set of exploitative labor relations, which is part of ongoing
processes of capitalism.
Other approaches place less emphasis on the exploitation of labor and focus more
on the extraction of data, arguing that platforms reconfigure life itself into a resource that
can be appropriated, managed, and sold by private corporations (Couldry and Mejias 2019).
Though the appropriation of data is also situated within longer processes of capitalism, this
approach departs from those above by conceptualizing the relationship between platform
users and platform owners as one of ―data colonialism‖ in which life itself is appropriated
as a raw material
―whether or not it is actually labor, or even labor-like‖ (Couldry and Mejias 2019, p. 338).
Rather than an expansion of the labor process, the analogy here is with the historical
appropriation of physical nature by colonial powers, which set the stage for industrial
capitalism. Thus, data colonialism sets the stage for a new, unprecedented stage of
capitalism, in which digital platforms serve as the technological means to produce a new
type of ―social‖ that can be ―continuously tracked, captured, sorted and counted for value
as ―data‖‖ (Couldry and Mejias 2019, p. 341). This datafication of all aspects of life creates
new possibilities for managing everything, leaving nothing outside of capitalist production
(Couldry and Mejias 2019, p. 343). Thus, the only way to resist data colonialism is to reject
its core logics, which means to question the underlying rationality that makes continuous
appropriation seem natural, necessary and an enhancement to human development, and to
reject data processing as a naturally occurring form of social knowledge rather than a
commercially motivated form of extraction (Couldry and Mejias 2019, p. 346). However,
taken from the perspective of actor-network theory, the question then becomes how data
colonialism, rather than an explanation for new power relations between platform users and
owners, is the result of the continuous work carried out by both, in conjunction with the work
done by platforms themselves to uphold these dynamics.
These approaches go a great distance in showing how digital platforms are economic
and ideological projects rather than the natural channels for social relations. Importantly, as
Andrejevic (2011, p. 286) notes, ―the affordances of the internet and the services that run
on it… change in accordance with the priorities of those who control this infrastructure, and
what is taken for granted one day… may well disappear the next.‖ However, if ―data
colonialism‖ is an analogy used to make sense of the end result of these relationships, then
the work put in by human and technological actors can be understood as highly contingent
rather than ruled by an invisible force or logic. What appears as data colonialism must be
constantly be performed, or else the analogy no longer will hold. Thus, these approaches
leave little room for analyzing the particular ways platform users exercise agency within their
exploitative/ extractive relationship with platform owners, and how they themselves make
sense of this relationship as well as the technology itself. Importantly, as Schwarz (2019, p.
119) has shown, the relationship between platform owners and platform users is often
framed by both parties in terms of political relations of governance rather than in purely
economic terms. Platform owners have an active interest in governing human interactions
on platforms because they are a source of profit, and molding them to certain behavioral
norms can maximize company profits (Schwarz 2019, p. 119). Corporations also take an
interest in governing to ward off attempts by external parties (such as congressional
committees or the Federal Communications Commission) to regulate or otherwise interfere
in how platforms operate. Furthermore, these approaches also do not take into account how
technology can divert human action in ways unintended by technology executives, and
perhaps not predicted by capitalist relations.
Thus, while digital platforms do reconfigure social life in new ways, this chapter will
also view them as ―a set of relations that constantly need to be performed‖ (van Dijck 2013,
p. 26). This means recognizing the complex and contingent ways actors of all kinds attribute
meaning to and make use of platforms, and how platforms themselves shape the
performance of social acts, not merely facilitate them (van Dijck 2013, p. 29). Thus, they do
not simply facilitate relations of exploitation or extraction, though that may be the result of
the continuous carrying out of relations between actors. Platforms also become another site
of governance, where new forms of power and domination take shape. As will be illustrated
below, platform owners have almost absolute power to police and condition behavior on
their platforms, which can have tremendous consequences for the ―offline‖ world. On the
other hand, as governed subjects, platform users also expect and demand certain rights
from technology corporations, just as citizens demand certain rights from their government.
These rights, as was explored in the previous chapter, relate to freedom of expression that
has typically been protected in public spaces, but it also tied to users‘ own economic
opportunities, as digital platforms have made political speech and political identity in itself
a monetizable commodity. Through this perspective, this chapter goes beyond the
frameworks of the political economy approaches outlined above, seeking to trace how
competing economic imperatives of various actors in relation to platforms play out, thus
resulting in platforms themselves being integrated into chains of association that construct
new relationships of power and domination, which on the one hand could be seen as a
continuation of the process of ―extensive commodification‖ of human life (Cohen 2008, p.
7), but on the other hand be seen as new ways of existing and acting as a political, governed
subject (Schwarz 2019, p. 119).
This is not to say that forces of capitalism do not ―exist,‖ but it is rather an approach
that will analyze the relationship between various actors that does not situate them in a pre-
given context. As actor-network theory would advise, this chapter does not seek to analyze
human actors as though they are operating at a micro level over which capitalism is a macro
structure somehow perpetually existing. As Latour (2005, p. 176) would explain, the
―macro‖ does not describe a wider or larger set of relations than what occurs at the
―micro.‖ Rather, it is ―another equally local, equally micro place, which is connected to
many others through some medium transporting specific types of traces‖ (Latour 2005, p.
176). Through tracing associations between various human and nonhuman actors,
recognizing how actors themselves are complex assemblages, it becomes possible to see
where and by what means structural effects are produced, and thus it is possible to explain
the arising proximity between actors such as
Diamond and Silk, virtually unknown before going viral, and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook‘s
powerful CEO. This is not to assert that a hierarchy does not exist among these actors, but it
is simply to say ―if you wish to go from one site to another, then you have to pay the full cost
of relation, connection, displacement, and information‖ (Latour 2005, p. 176). In the
following sections, this chapter will revisit the case of Diamond and Silk and their complaints
against Facebook to further investigate how the relationship between platform users and
platform owners is understood by both parties not only in economic terms, but in terms of
political rights and governance. As will be shown, the rights of platform ―good citizens‖ to
free expression is also tied to rights to free entrepreneurship, in which political speech and
status as a political actor on the platform can be monetized or otherwise leveraged for
material gain. Thus, the particular contradiction between Facebook as a public forum and,
at the same time, a privately owned platform is productive of new types of actors, new
relations between these actors, and new types of dominance and agency that previous
accounts of the political economy of social media have not taken into consideration.
“Founder Primacy”: A New Autocracy?
With the rising primacy of digital platforms in terms of their sheer market value as well
as their integration into everyday life, company founders represent a new figuration of power,
exercising outsize control over the platform both as a corporate entity and as a community
of users that must be governed. As scholars of corporate governance have noted, this
amount of power vested in one individual over an entire corporation is, for the most part,
unprecedented and is particular to technology companies (Weihe 2017, p. 182). Founders
of technology companies, who also often occupy the position of CEO and/ or controlling
shareholder often justify their power in terms of governance, appealing to notions of the
public good of the community, whether that be society in general or their platform‘s users
specifically. The contradictions of a privately-owned public space, as was discussed in the
previous chapter, have created new relationships of power and domination, where the near-
absolute power vested in technology company founders is assembled from various
constitutive parts. The following section takes Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook as an
example, tracing how Zuckerberg has achieved the status of what some commentators have
called an autocrat (Farrell et al. 2018) through various sets of relations that are also
characteristic of other technology corporations (Molla 2019), but also through business
deals that have allowed Facebook to effectively dominate the social media industry,
neutralizing threats from competing platforms and their founders.
As technology companies have become economic giants, there has been a trend
towards what corporate governance scholars have called ―founder primacy‖ (Weihe 2017).
A phenomenon common to technology companies in particular, founder primacy is a mode
of corporate governance in which company founders ―are afforded significant control that
overrides institutional investors, public shareholders, and even the company‘s own board of
directors‖ (Weihe 2017, p. 176-177). This new form of governance stand in opposition to
notions of shareholder democracy, which puts forth the theory that corporations exist to
serve the interest of their shareholders; thus shareholders should have a right to vote in order
to determine the outcome of the company board election (Hayden and Bodie 2010, p. 2087).
Common models of shareholder democracy usually grant each shareholder one vote per
each share they hold, thus giving their voice power in proportion to the amount of money
they have invested in the corporation (Hayden and Bodie 2010, p. 2087). Looking further back
into the history of American corporations in the nineteenth century, models of shareholder
democracy would also occasionally grant every shareholder one vote, regardless of the
amount of shares they possessed (Smythe 2006, p. 1416), further emphasizing how the
current trend towards founder primacy is a historically unique formation that represents a
new configuration of power.
Founder primacy arises from a structure of multi-tiered classes of stock, in which
holders of one class of stalk have more voting power than holders of other classes. Facebook
provides a case in point example, with Zuckerberg being the board chair, CEO, and controller
of the majority of voting power among Facebook shareholders (Stewart 2018). Like many
publicly traded technology companies, Facebook‘s shares operate on a dual class structure,
consisting of Class A stock that is openly traded on the New York exchange, and Class B
stock that is owned by Facebook executives and other insiders. In terms of corporate
governance, Class A shareholders are allocated one vote per share, while Class B
shareholders receive 10 votes per share (Stewart 2018). As a result, independent investors
have substantially less of a voice in how the company is run. Class B Facebook investors
control close to 70 percent of the voting share, with Zuckerberg alone controlling 58 percent
(Durkee 2019). Despite the fact that this type of power distribution is increasingly common
among technology companies, the amount of power that company founders retain is
considered unprecedented (Weihe 2017, p. 182).
Opponents of multi-class stock structures argue that the resulting founder primacy
leads to a lack of accountability and poor management. These concerns played out among
Facebook shareholders in the wake of 2016‘s fake news controversy and revelations about
the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the data analytics firm used improperly obtained
Facebook user data to build voter profiles. Leading up to the company‘s annual shareholder
meeting in May 2019, many independent shareholders voiced their dissatisfaction with how
Zuckerberg was running the company as well as his overall outsize influence (Durkee 2019).
Independent shareholders, investment firms, and investor activist groups including Arjuna
Capital and the Center for Media Justice launched a ―Vote No‖ campaign to urge the board
to withhold their support of
Zuckerberg‘s position on it (OpenMIC 2019). However, even though 68 percent of
independent investors did vote to separate the roles of CEO and board chair, Zuckerberg
retained both positions due to his majority voting power. Effectively, the only way to reduce
Zuckerberg‘s
power is for him to voluntarily give it up.
Zuckerberg has also assembled his power through acquiring competing platforms,
giving him access to their users‘ data and terminating potential threats to Facebook‘s
dominance. Facebook‘s high-profile purchases of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014,
for $1 billion and $22 billion respectively, neutralized potential market competition as
Zuckerberg sought to consolidate Facebook‘s dominance in the social network industry
(―Facebook Buys Instagram‖ 2012; Olson 2014). Though Facebook had plans to develop its
own mobile photo-sharing application in 2011, Zuckerberg decided it would be more
effective to acquire Instagram, which came with a built-in community of over 27 million users
at the time of purchase (―Facebook Buys Instagram‖ 2012). Similarly, WhatsApp had a vast
global user base for its mobile messenger service, with 450 million active monthly users in
2014 (Facebook 2014). In both cases, Zuckerberg vowed the applications would retain their
autonomy, with the co-founders of each company staying on to continue running their
platforms. However, as pressure to monetize mounted Zuckerberg would walk back this vow,
leading to Instagram co-founders Kevin
Systrom and Mike Kreiger to resign in September 2018 (Isaac 2018), and WhatsApp co-
founders
Brian Acton to leave in 2017 and Jan Koum in 2018 (Constine 2018). Acton‘s departure in
particular raised eyebrows, as many commentators noted the contradiction between the
WhatsApp founder‘s stance as a ―pro-privacy zealot‖ (WhatsApp messages are end-to-end
encrypted by default) with Facebook‘s business model that is reliant on selling user data to
advertisers (Olson 2018). The initial deal had caused a stir in the technology community, with
a
$19 billion pay out to a platform that was not yet monetized seeming like a risky move at best.
In an interview with Forbes, Acton claimed he left because he was angry that Facebook had
updated its terms of service so that WhatsApp and Facebook user accounts would be linked,
after Acton had expressly testified to European Union antitrust regulators that user data
between the two platforms would be difficult to blend (Olson 2018). Acton‘s ―lie‖ did in fact
lead to EU regulators to issue Facebook a $122 million fine, a slap on the wrist for a company
whose profits were $70.7 billion in 2018 (Olson 2018). Zuckerberg‘s endeavors to find ways
to monetize
WhatsApp also did not sit well with its co-founders. According to Acton, Zuckerberg and
Sheryl
Sandberg, Facebook‘s chief operating officer, presented plans to insert targeted advertising
into its Status feature and to sell businesses tools to chat directly with users, with the
eventual aim of selling these businesses user data analytics (Olson 2018). Though Facebook
has acquired several other businesses, the WhatsApp case in particular is representative of
a new business strategy of purchasing competitors not for outright profit, but for access to
user bases, and the promise of future monetization based on access to those users‘
personal data. In this way, Zuckerberg has worked to consolidate his dominance in the social
networking industry, which in turn lends him autocratic power over platform users beyond
the realm of Facebook‘s core platform.
Thus, Zuckerberg represents a new kind of political-economic actor, one who is not
accountable to other actors within Facebook‘s corporate structure, giving him the ability to
broadly determine the direction of the company and therefore the power to govern the
publicprivate forum that is constitutive of the company itself. Zuckerberg himself has
acknowledged the novelty of the power Facebook, and thus himself, wields over the public.
In a feature for the Guardian in 2017, he mused, ―In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a
government than a traditional company… We have this large community of people, and more
than other technology companies, we‘re really setting the policies‖ (Foer 2017). In a
subsequent interview, he elaborated on these comments, speaking to the company‘s need
to adjudicate disputes within its community (Klein 2018).These comments led to an analysis
piece for Vox entitled ―Mark
Zuckerberg runs a nation-state, and he‘s the king,‖ noting his power to change the ―laws of
[his] realms‖ by adjusting the terms of service and algorithms (Farrell et al. 2018).
Importantly, the network effects of user lock-in are also significant, meaning even if
individual users might prefer a different platform of system of governance, due to the vast
amount of other users and daily tasks that rely on Facebook, leaving the network is extremely
difficult (Farrell et al. 2018). In these ways, Facebook, and by extension Mark Zuckerberg,
seems to exercise autocratic rule over its constituency of over 2 billion users. Thus, founder
primacy refers not only to the power founders exercise over the corporate apparatus of their
companies, but also over their platform users and the daily interactions that play out over
the platform.
While some commentators have compared Zuckerberg to an absolute monarch, he
often justifies his status in terms of good governance, implying that his centralized power is
essential for the public good and overall best interest of the Facebook community. In defense
of multiclass stock structures, Zuckerberg and other proponents have argued that such
structure insulates corporate management from being bound to shareholders‘ short-term
financial goals (Stewart 2019). Zuckerberg has said that Facebook‘s multi-class stock
structure is beneficial when looking for solutions to issues like fake news and data security.
Because he is not at the whim of shareholders, the company is now able to design products
over time that will be in the best interest of the Facebook community (Klein 2018). Here,
Zuckerberg‘s autocratic power is legitimated by framing it as necessary for protecting users
from harm that would inevitably arise from shareholders‘ financial interests, completely
overlooking the fact that Zuckerberg himself is the controlling shareholder of the
corporation. In defense of Facebook‘s advertising-based business model, which requires
constant surveillance and data extraction, Zuckerberg has said that it is necessary to keep
the platform and its services free to users (Klein 2018). In an interview with Ezra Klein for Vox,
he again appealed to the best interests of Facebook‘s community, saying, ―the reality here
is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are
a lot of people who can‘t afford to pay… if you want to build a service which is not just serving
rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford‖ (Klein 2018). These
examples illustrate how technology executives often legitimize the ―enlightened
despotism‖ they exercise over their platforms by arguing it is necessary for recognizing user
rights, community benefit, and the common good (Schwarz 2019, p. 132). Thus, founder
primacy represents a new figuration of power that vests founders of technology companies
with unprecedented authority over their corporations, platforms, and platform users. Firms
like Facebook heavily rely on advertising vis-a-vis the extraction and selling of user data,
which comes with the imperative for these executives to govern platforms and platform users
to maximize this profit (Schwarz 2019, p. 119). Analyzing these new relations as purely
economic in nature misses how digital platforms also are constitutive of political relations
of governance (Schwarz 2019, p. 119) in which autocratic powers are legitimated by
appealing to the public good, and users give up certain rights, most notably the right to
privacy, in exchange for the benevolent protection and leadership of the company founder.
By moderating ―offensive‖ content, combatting issues such as ―fake news‖ and spam, and
even actions as basic as keeping access to the platform free are examples of how technology
executives exercise this enlightened despotism. On the other side of this relationship are the
governed platform subjects, who are submitted to the power and economic exploitation of
the executives, but also exercise and demand their own rights. Digital platforms, while
mediating new forms of extraction and profit for platform owners, also become integrated
into a new figuration of the ―political entrepreneur,‖ illustrated by the previous chapter‘s
discussion of proTrump sisters Diamond and Silk, who were able to monetize their political
speech through the algorithms and metrics of Facebook and YouTube. However, it is not only
political speech that has become monetizable in new ways; as platforms become integrated
into the actions of political entrepreneurs, political subjects themselves become
commodifiable, leading to new modes of political action in which the rights of the platform
citizen are also connected to the right to self-monetize.
Platform Subjects and Political Entrepreneurs
Digital platforms offer users new ways to monetize political speech, but this process
is extended further: it is the very self that becomes commodified through digital platforms in
ways that are profitable not just to the corporation but also to the self. In the literature,
scholars have related the phenomenon of self-branding and practices of micro-celebrity on
social media to the expansion of neoliberal governance in which subjects are empowered to
―conceive of themselves as entrepreneurial subjects, responsible for the success or failure
of their own conduct, ultimately maintaining the ―formal game of inequalities‖ on which the
neoliberal order is based‖ (Bandinelli and Arvidsson 2012, p. 68). This resonates with the
central idea of self-branding, especially as carried out on social media, that just like other
commercially branded products, individuals can benefit from developing distinctive selling
points and an identity ―that is singularly charismatic and responsive to the needs and
interests of target audiences‖ (Khamis et al. 2017, p. 191). The personal brand becomes a
crucial asset, the curation of which is essential for establishing affiliation with a particular
subgroup, attracting funding, connections, and labor power (Bandinelli and Arvidsson 2012,
p. 68). Thus, as data about platform users is extracted as monetizable data points for the
corporation, users are themselves able to incorporate algorithmic design and platform
affordances into their own identity construction and actions for personal profit.
However, what these approaches to self-branding overlook is that the relationship
between platform users and platform owners articulated in economic terms, but more often
in terms of governance as both parties attempt to assert their position in relation to the other.
As Schwarz (2019, p. 119) notes, technology companies have a vested interest in governing
the human interactions that play out over their platforms. Because these interactions are a
source of profit, this profit can be maximized through rational governance, or in other words,
preventing users from acting in ways that offend other users, which would discourage them
from using the platform, and therefore lower the platform‘s value to advertisers (Schwarz
2019, p. 120).
According to Schwarz (2019, p. 126), the key tool in Facebook and other digital platforms‘
governance toolkits is the way in which platforms configure human relations into generalized
social capital over which platforms owners then exercise a monopoly. In other words, social
capital, in the typical sense defined as the capacity to convert relationships, group
membership, and network position into economic resources, vital information, or political
power (Schwarz 2019, p. 123), becomes concrete, knowable, trackable, and manipulable
through digital platforms in the forms of friends, likes, shares, retweets, etc. Technology
companies have the power, then, to cut individuals off from this social capital, or otherwise
impact it in various ways, as this particular kind of social capital does not exist
independently of platforms themselves.
To users who actively seek to monetize themselves through self-branding on social
media, the threat of losing access to their social capital is detrimental. Their relationship to
platform technology and platform owners is economic in many ways: first, in platform
owners‘ practice of data extraction for corporate profit, and second in users‘ ability to
convert platformspecific social capital into monetary rewards and other resources.
However, at the same time it is also a relationship between a governing entity and a governed
subject. Platform owners police the platform community, seeking to condition ―good
citizens‖ who adhere to certain codes of conduct and content policies so that these good
citizens can be as profitable as possible for the company (Schwarz 2019, p. 127). Users‘
ability to cultivate and leverage social capital, which can have tremendous consequences in
the ―offline‖ world is conditional; it is tied to their ability to fulfill the role of a good citizen.
Thus, digital platforms make possible new forms of power and domination, as well as new
modes of being and acting as a political subject. Importantly, it is not the purpose of this
chapter to adjudicate whether or not political entrepreneurs are purely seeking financial
gains by cynically instrumentalizing particular political messages. Instead, the aim is to trace
through what chains of association this action is possible, and how it is also connected to
these new modes of governance and being governed.
Discussed in the previous chapter, pro-Trump sisters Diamond and Silk are exemplary
of successful political entrepreneurs, who have been able to convert social capital (again,
rendered measurable and manipulable) accumulated on digital platforms into financial gain
and access to powerful institutions. Despite becoming famous in the wake of the 2016
election, their YouTube channel had existed since 2014, with videos only garnering around a
dozen views each, according to the sisters themselves (Stuart 2016). However, all of that
changed on August 5,
2015 when they posted a scathing video criticizing Megyn Kelly‘s performance as a
moderator for the Republican primary debate, which to date has 1.7 million views, and their
channel has
265,000 subscribers (Diamond and Silk 2015). Their Facebook page, on which they post links
to YouTube videos as well as share other content, has 1.9 million followers to date and 1.8
million likes. As Khamis et al. (2017, p. 195) have noted, this broader shift towards media
convergence is conducive to self-branding as the emotive pull of users‘ message and identity
is sustained more widely across multiple platforms. Even during the period when they
claimed to be ―censored,‖ a ThinkProgress report found that in January 2018, their
Facebook page received over 1.3 million reactions, comments, and shares, which was
higher than any month in the previous year. The report also found that while video views
across Facebook had gone down, the sisters were still faring better than liberal pages.
Between March 2017 and March 2018, while
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow‘s video views had declined from 6 million to 1.2 million,
Diamond and Silk‘s views had gone only from 4.1 million to 1.8 million, meaning they actually
received more video views than the anchor of the country‘s most popular cable television
show (Legum 2018).
By leveraging the social capital they accumulated on digital platforms, Diamond and
Silk were then able to financially benefit, as well as gain access to powerful institutions
within legacy media and within government itself, which in turn led to further exposure and
greater ability to accumulate social capital on digital media. In a rally in Des Moines during
the presidential election, Trump introduced the pair, praising them for becoming ―very
famous and rich‖ while stumping for him (Stuart 2016). Indeed, their support for Trump has
seemed to prove lucrative.
Their website sold ―Women 4 Trump‖ branded hats, tee shirts, and coffee mugs, they are
embarking on a speaking tour in 2020 with tickets starting at $50 and VIP passes going for
$150, and they reportedly are in the process of writing a book (Diamond and Silk 2017).
During their congressional hearing in 2018, a point of contention was whether or not they
had been paid by the Trump campaign, a claim the sisters vehemently denied as ―fake
news‖ even when Representative Sheila Jackson Lee cited a Federal Election Commission
filing stating they had indeed received $1,274 from the campaign for ―field consulting‖
(Gold 2018). Thus, Diamond and Silk have been highly successful in converting the
quantifiable social capital they have accumulated on Facebook and YouTube into various
streams of revenue, as well as appearances on legacy media like Fox News and CNN
(Stewart 2019), and a close relationship with the president himself. However, when they
perceived Facebook was actively intervening to decrease this social capital, their grievances
against the company were framed in terms of governance rather than in purely economic
terms.
Taking a closer look at how the sisters framed their accusations at Facebook, their
claims are primarily formulated in terms of their rights as citizens of the Facebook
community, rather than in terms of a small business whose ability to make profit has been
hindered. As discussed at length in the previous chapter, Diamond and Silk leveled claims
of censorship and discrimination against Facebook, implying that their problem with the
corporation was in its capacity as a regulator, or in other words, as a governing entity. This
had an economic dimension to it, but the primary focus of their complaints, as with
Republicans‘ complaints in general, were aimed at platforms‘ content moderation policies
and the enforcement of those policies. According to the original Facebook post in which the
sisters list their complaints, they alleged that Facebook sent them a notice stating their
―content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community‖ and that the
decision was non-appealable in any way (Diamond and Silk 2018).
From Facebook‘s side, content moderation is framed as being for the greater public good of
the community over which it governs. As Schwarz (2019, p. 131) has noted, Facebook itself
contributes to the political framing by borrowing legitimating rhetoric from the political
sphere such as alluding to an ―appeals‖ process, adopting a legal code of ―Community
Standards‖ and other quasi-constitutional ―governing documents.‖ On their part, the
sisters do not frame their own complaints outside of this paradigm, instead questioning
Facebook‘s enforcement of these codes, asking, for example, ―when exactly did the brand
and context become unsafe to the community?‖ and ―didn't FB violate their own policy
when FB stopped sending notifications to the Millions of people who liked and followed our
brand page?‖ (Diamond and Silk 2018). Thus, the relationship between both parties is
understood in terms of governance rather than in purely economic terms. This episode is
also exemplary of how economic concerns and rights of
Facebook ―citizens‖ have become inextricably intertwined. The right to monetize the self on
digital platforms through leveraging of social capital, understood as quantifiable metrics
specific to these platforms, is understood as the right of the platform citizen as long as their
action is within the bounds of acceptable behavior, no matter how autocratic or by which
opaque mechanisms those bounds are determined, thus creating a new kind of social
contract. Acting outside the norms of a ―good citizen‖ results in punishment in the form of
reduced social capital. The emergence of new forms of governance, power,
domination, and ways of being as a political subject has also led to new circumstances
where actors who are in government, thus potentially possessing the capacity to implement
laws and regulations for technology companies and their platforms, are also governed by
these very companies. As Schwarz (2019, p. 123) notes, firms, politicians, brands,
individuals, and social movements alike create identities on digital platforms and through an
isomorphic process begin accumulating likes, connections, friends, retweets, and other
forms of social capital. The tensions created by this new form of power technology
companies, and their CEOs in particular, hold is manifest in several of the episodes
discussed in the previous chapter like Trump‘s social media summit at the White
House, as well as Zuckerberg‘s many appearances before congressional committees. To
take a specific example, Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Republican congresswoman
who questioned Zuckerberg about Diamond and Silk‘s accusations during a hearing, had her
own skirmish with Twitter and its governing policies. During her campaign, Twitter barred
Blackburn from paying to promote her campaign launch video due to ―inflammatory
language‖ (Robillard 2017). The company had decided that a line in the video in which she
brags about her track record fighting Planned Parenthood‘s sale of ―baby body parts‖
violated its advertising policies, though it later reversed its decision (Robillard 2017). In this
case, Twitter had intervened to limit
Blackburn‘s ability to convert video views, likes, and retweets not into money (though
perhaps through campaign donations) but ultimately into votes, or in other words, political
power in the typical sense. This is not to say that a politician‘s chances of being elected are
entirely contingent on their social media presence. However, it is to illustrate how digital
platforms become integrated into new dynamics of power, in which good citizenship on such
platforms is policed by platform owners in order to maximize profitability for the corporation,
and the user‘s performance of good citizenship comes with the rights to cultivate, monetize,
and otherwise leverage valuable social capital in ways that can have serious implications for
the ―offline‖ world.
Conclusion
This chapter has shown how digital platforms are integral to the formation of new
political-economic actors, giving rise to new assemblages of power and dominance in which
platform founders exercise outsize control over their users, not solely through economic
exploitation, but also through modes of governance that condition user behavior. The need
for governance stems from platform owners‘ need to maximize the profitability of user
behavior, as shown through the various ―community standards‖ and content policies
platforms like Facebook implement (Schwarz 2019, p. 131). Governance by platform owners
attempts to mold platform users into ―good citizens‖ who comply with these terms,
punishing those who do not comply by cutting off their access to social capital mediated by
the platform itself.
Thus, digital platforms themselves are actors, carrying out work that helps assemble
these new formations. Digital platforms, themselves complex assemblages, do the work of
creating, aggregating, and circulating the generalized social capital that is an integral link in
the relationship between platform users and platform owners. Likes, shares, views, and
retweets are essential for the political entrepreneur. These metrics are constitutive of
generalized social capital that is concrete, trackable, and manipulable; as social capital,
platform users can convert these metrics into money, access to institutions, and
relationships with powerful figures, as seen with the story of political entrepreneurs
Diamond and Silk. Therefore, platform users do not solely exist in a relationship of
exploitation and extraction with platform owners. As long as they comply with the content
policies and behavioral norms of the platform, good platform citizens have access to this
social capital and are free to monetize their political speech and selves-asbrands as they
see fit. These relations give rise to a new social contract of sorts, in which platform citizens
give up their right to privacy in exchange for their rights to platform-specific social capital.
These formations of founder primacy and political entrepreneur are historically new
and highly contingent, dependent on complex associations between human and nonhuman
actors that must continually be carried out. The end result of these associations are new
relations of governance, exploitation, and domination, giving rise to analyses such as
Couldry and Mejias (2019) analogy of ―data colonialism.‖ However, in the perspective put
forth by this chapter, relations of a new colonialism, rather than being the explanatory
factors, is the end result of these associations, rendered visible by the continuous work put
in by platform owners, platform users, and the platforms themselves. Thus, once the work
stops being done, the analogy falls apart, revealing that it was always held up in the first
place by these traceable associations rather than
by invisible, underlying, and perpetual forces.
Chapter 3
Political Institutions and the Formation of Online Collectivities
Overview
As the first presidential candidate in a generation to openly run as a socialist, Bernie
Sanders‘ 2016 primary campaign brought the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) into
the national spotlight. Though the DSA was formed in the 1980s, for much of its existence it
has escaped the notice of mainstream politics. Due to Sanders‘ highly publicized calls for
democratic socialism, the organization experienced unprecedented growth in numbers,
increasing its membership eightfold from the launch of Sanders‘ campaign in 2015 to the
midterm elections of 2018. Part of the reason for the DSA‘s growth was its strategy of
independently working to support Sanders‘ campaign, leveraging publicity from the
campaign to direct Sanders‘ supporters to potentially joining the organization. However, the
transformations the organization underwent is only partially represented by looking at its
spike in membership.
Rather, the DSA is exemplary of how long standing political institutions are being
fundamentally altered by digital platforms. Accounts of the DSA‘s growth attribute it to
Sanders‘ popularity, backlash against Trump‘s election, and the role of sites like Twitter in
making socialist discourse more accessible to a wider audience. While these factors scratch
the surface of the DSA‘s transformation, a deeper look suggests that digital platforms play
an integral role in bringing new organizational structures and modes of political action into
being. The case of the DSA shows how these new forms are not simply cases of an
organization that has simply
―discovered‖ the internet as a means of recruitment (Chadwick 2007, p. 296). Instead, it
shows how existing institutions absorb these new forms of action and organization, both in
terms of the human actors seeking to join, and the digital platforms themselves as agents
that exert change in their own right. Thus, this chapter seeks to unpack the assemblage of
these new organizations, which are subsumed into familiar institutions.
Connective Action and Platform Practices
Scholars have argued that in postindustrial democracies widespread social
fragmentation, particularly among younger generations, has led to ―individuation as the
model social condition,‖ making it harder for actors to coalesce around typical collective
identities through political parties, ideological programs, and other formal organizations
(Bennett 2012, p. 22). Pointing to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the indignados anti-
austerity movement in Spain, Bennett and Segerberg (2012, p. 741) argue large-scale
political participation is now carried out through the logic of connective action, in which the
driving force is individuals‘ interpersonal networks, structured and scaled up through digital
communication technology.
Though people still may join political action in large numbers, ―the identity reference is
more derived through inclusive and diverse large-scale personal expression,‖ whereas in
traditional collective action, it is ―through common group or ideological identification‖
(Bennett and
Segerberg 2012, p. 744). Political content in the form of easily personalized ideas such as
Occupy‘s famous ―We are the 99%‖ slogan are shared across individuals‘ digital networks,
calling people to participate based on their personal identification with such ideas, rather
than identification with a particular organization (Bennett and Segerberg 2012, p. 744). Thus,
according to this approach digital platforms are facilitating a new logic of connective action
conducive to late modern societies ―in which formal organizations are losing their grip on
individuals, and group ties are being replaced by large-scale, fluid social networks‖ (Bennett
and Segerberg 2012, p. 748).
However, while interpersonal digital networks are increasingly important to
structuring and mobilizing political participation, formal organizations have not disappeared
and still play a crucial role in politics today. Connective action may bring together loosely
organized individuals based on personalized action frames, but digital platforms have also
transformed long-standing political institutions. As Bennett and Segerberg (2012, p. 753)
argue, networks are not just the precursors or building blocks to collective action; the
networks themselves are the new organizational structures of such action. Drawing on
Latour (2005), they also note how networking technologies are agents that run alongside
human actors, calibrating relationships and storing digital, physical traces to provide
memory records and action repertoires that can be passed on (Bennett and Segerberg 2012,
p. 753). Thus, the question becomes how these interpersonal digital networks also overlap
with, are absorbed by, and feed into lasting political institutions, thus fundamentally
transforming familiar parties and organizations? In part by blurring the lines between formal
organizations and more seemingly amorphous political action, digital platforms drive rapid
institutional adaptation and experimentation, as different types of organizations borrow
from each other‘s digital network repertoires (Chadwick 2007, p. 285).
In many ways, digital platforms make it possible for grassroots actors to renew old
institutions such as political parties from the ―outside-in,‖ as digitally-enabled citizens
remake parties ―in their own participatory image‖ (Chadwick and Stromer-Galley 2016, p.
283). Chadwick and Stromer-Galley (2016, p. 283) say that digital media foster a culture of
political experimentation in which people can adopt a ―party-as-movement‖ mentality,
rejecting norms of hierarchical discipline and long-term partisan loyalty that has traditionally
characterized parties.
Taking Barack Obama‘s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns as examples, Chadwick and
Stromer-Galley (2016, p. 285) explain that while digital media are useful for campaign elites‘
―computational management‖ and ―controlled interactivity‖ from the top-down, they can
also be used for fostering openness and grassroots participation in directing the Democratic
party and its candidate‘s policies and goals. Like Bennett and Segerberg (2012), Chadwick
and StromerGalley (2016, p. 287) argue that participation in an electoral campaign is a form
of individual expression, where the party-as-movement mentality can easily accommodate
populist appeals on both the left and right side of the political spectrum. New organizational
forms and action are made possible through digital network technologies that set up
complex interactions between the online and offline environment, allowing for fast
repertoire-switching within a single campaign or from one campaign to the next (Chadwick
2007, p. 284). Chadwick (2007, p. 285) draws on Tilly‘s concept of repertoires as a ―limited
set of routines that are learned, shared and acted out through a relatively deliberate process
of choice,‖ arguing that these online repertoires play a role in sustaining collective identity.
Rather than neutral tools to be adopted at will, these digital network repertoires actively
shape what it means to be a participant in a political organization, in some ways reflecting
how ―the medium in the message‖ (McLuhan 1964, quoted in Chadwick 2007, p. 286).
Therefore, the forms of digital action individuals adopt inform how collectivities are
assembled and sustained, bringing ―fringe‖ organizations like the DSA into closer proximity
with mainstream institutions and campaigns and lending it greater visibility through digital
interpersonal networks to actors who otherwise might not have been exposed to the
organization and its ideals.
The DSA is an informative case for examining how digital platforms fundamentally
alter long-standing political institutions, as from its inception has had a loosely coordinated
network structure, with National Director Maria Svart saying in a 2015 interview, ―we are an
activist organization, so what we fundamentally do is educate the public, educate ourselves
about history and mobilize people and organize people to work together‖ (C-SPAN 2015).
Throughout its history, as will be explored in more detail below, it has at varying levels sought
to operate as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, involving itself in national
electoral politics well before Bernie Sanders‘ primary campaigns in 2016 and 2020. The
following sections will seek to trace the organization‘s transformation to the present day,
showing how digital platforms fundamentally transform existing political institutions as
these platforms become integrated into new repertoires of action that inform how
institutions are assembled, how their collectivity is constituted, and their modes of
conducting politics. While the DSA did experience massive growth, the transformations to
the organization far exceed its unprecedented increase in duespaying members. First, this
chapter will explore the history of the DSA, emphasizing its involvement with electoral
politics to date. Then, its explosive growth throughout the events of the 2016 presidential
election will be discussed, illustrating how digital platforms are perceived to have affected
how the organization attracts and mobilizes new members. After that, it will analyze how
these accounts of social media recruitment overlook the agency of digital platforms
themselves in working to bring new political actions and collectivities into being. This new
form of politics drastically alters the composition of long-standing political institutions as
they seek to absorb this new form of politics.
DSA Historical Background
Founded in 1982 by Michael Harrington, the DSA was meant to function as an
institution independent of the Democratic and Republican parties, though Harrington
envisioned it mainly as a progressive force to put pressure on the Democrats. At its founding,
the organization had about 6,000 members who came together in a merger of the New
American Movement (NAM) and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC).
Following a vision of coalition politics, Harrington brought the two groups together in the
hopes of uniting trade unionists, feminists, black, Latino, and socialist activists against the
prevailing Reaganomics of the time
(Schwartz 2017). On foreign policy, Harrington was critical of the ―new colonialism‖
perpetuated by international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank, while domestically he championed a democratically planned economy,
rejecting neoliberalism and emphasizing the importance of local government intervention to
meet the economic needs of communities (Harrington and Howe 1984). However Harrington
and Irving Howe, a co-founder of left-wing magazine Dissent, saw the Democratic Party as
the DSA‘s
―main arena of action,‖ and followed a strategy of ―realignment,‖ which sought to
transform the Democratic Party from within (Harrington and Howe 1984). Famously,
Harrington‘s motto and approach was to be the ―left wing of the possible,‖ or, in other
words, to build coalitions between socialists and progressives outside of socialist ranks,
such as the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, to push for progressive reforms (Isserman
2018). Though this viewpoint was not without contestation from within the organization itself
and across the broader left in general, it led DSA leadership to be involved in electoral
politics in hopes of pushing through their preferred policies.
In 1988 the DSA officially endorsed Jesse Jackson‘s candidacy for the Democratic
nomination for president. Jackson‘s platform opposed US intervention in Latin America and
set forth a New Deal-style infrastructure program, a single-payer healthcare system, free
college education, and reversal of tax cuts for the rich (Everett 2020). Many have argued that
Jackson‘s campaign set the precedent for Bernie Sanders in 2016 (Sanders did endorse
Jackson in 1988 when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont) (Kruse 2019). His campaign
popularized the term
―economic justice‖ as a critique of both the Democratic and Republican parties, which had
increasingly turned towards neoliberalism (Everett 2020). When the DSA first voiced the idea
of an endorsement, staff members from the Jackson campaign reportedly asked it to
withhold, fearing association with ―socialism‖ would harm Jackson‘s electoral chances,
though Jackson himself intervened and ended up accepting the endorsement (Nicholas
2015). However,
Jackson‘s campaign and the DSA endorsement did face criticism from within the DSA and
other progressives. As Mike Davis (2018) writes, ―the ascendancy of electoralism on the
left, far from being an expression of new popular energies or mobilizations, was, on the
contrary, a symptom of the decline of the social movements of the 1960s, accompanied by
the organic crisis of the trade-union and community-service bureaucracies.‖ Echoes of this
dissatisfaction with socialist participation in Democratic politics were heard in 2015, when
Sanders, a lifelong independent, announced his campaign would be for the Democratic
ticket, rather than as an independent.
Critiquing this move, a DSA member from Brooklyn told the Wall Street Journal, ―the
Democratic Party is where social movements go to die‖ (Nicholas 2015).
In the 1990s, the DSA actively took part in the global justice movement against
globalization and was forced to rethink its strategy of realignment as the Democratic Party
under the leadership of President Bill Clinton embraced neoliberal economic policies. The
DSA strongly opposed the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement as well as Clinton‘s policies
that deregulated finance and repealed protections against mergers between commercial
and investment banks that had been enshrined in the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 (Canova
2008).
Instead of realignment, the DSA opted for an ―inside-outside‖ approach, which was not
geared exclusively towards working within the Democratic Party nor towards building a
political party of its own (Canova 2008). However, the DSA still participated in the electoral
realm, endorsing John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008, despite apparent
reservations about both candidates (Canova 2008). Canova critically notes that in both
elections, DSA leadership held the position that socialists were ―duty-bound‖ to choose
the ―lesser-evil capitalist party‖ in an effort to defeat Republicans.
Given the DSA‘s past record the electoral politics, its early vocal support of Bernie
Sanders‘ presidential run was met with criticism from both within the organization and the
broader left. Comparing Sanders‘ 2015 campaign to Jackson‘s 1988 campaign, Everett
(2020) notes that Harrington‘s approach to using the Rainbow Coalition as a means to
consolidate the DSA‘s coalition-building efforts within the Democratic Party was a failure.
Pointing to how Jackson brought the Rainbow Coalition under his control after the party
convention, Everett argued, ―For Jackson and aspiring Black politicians, the Rainbow
offered a bargaining chip to negotiate with Democratic Party power brokers. Once the party
leadership had resolved to cut a deal with Jackson rather than lock him out, the Rainbow‘s
independence could only be a hindrance to his ambitions.‖ Thus, the upshot of 1988 was
that the Rainbow Left was tolerated only so long as it worked towards electoral ends, or in
other words, towards expanding the
Democrats‘ voting base. From this, Everett (2020) concluded, ―The pathway to building the
left does not lead through the DSA nor along the path of campaigning for a Sanders‘
presidency. Instead we must build a new, revolutionary left in our workplaces, in our schools
and campuses, and on the streets.‖ However, when making the case for Sanders‘ campaign,
DSA leadership was careful to draw distinctions between the present and the strategies of
the past. Editor of Jacobin magazine and long-time DSA member Bhaksar Sunkara (2015)
argued that Sanders presented
the chance to strengthen the left in the long term. Contrasting Harrington‘s approach of
realignment of the Democrats, Sunkara instead said, ―our goal must be to transcend the
Democratic Party entirely.‖
Therefore, in 2015 the DSA saw its involvement in national electoral politics in
different terms than in the past. Rather than viewing the Sanders‘ campaign as an
opportunity to pressure the Democratic Party to move to the left on various issues, people
within the DSA argued it could be an invaluable opportunity to grow the DSA itself and build
a strong leftist movement outside the Democratic Party (Guastella 2015). Noting how
Sanders was the ―first serious leftwing candidate in a generation‖ to embrace the explicitly
―socialist‖ label, Guastella argued that supporting him ―would be a chance for leftists to
flex our electoral muscles and for millions to see that there is an alternative to the policies of
neoliberal capitalism‖ (Guastella 2015). The DSA‘s major mistake of 1988, Guastella wrote,
was not using the Jackson campaign to build its own organization, so that there would be
institutional growth that could then outlast the race itself. Thus, Sanders represented an
opportunity to get it right, a chance to ―organize those freshman radicals towards an
immediate goal and build connections and skills to mobilize sympathizers in the future‖
(Guastella 2015). To sum it up the DSA ―[needed] Bernie, not as a savior but as a tool for
future organizing‖ (Guastella 2015).
Thus, in accounts looking ahead to the 2016 election, the desired growth of the DSA
is understood as being premised on a strategic shift on the part of its members, with people
like Guastella and Sunkara outlining different tactics for the DSA than those deployed in
1988. DSA members hoped they could leverage the Sanders campaign to independently
grow a stronger left and direct a wider audience to the DSA as an alternative to the
Democratic and Republican parties. However, viewing the growth of the organization as
resulting from a conscious strategic shift denies the agency of digital platforms themselves
in structuring an entirely new organizational form, and with it, new forms of constitutive
action. While this is not to argue that the DSA‘s growth was technologically determined, it is
to recognize and analyze how the interpersonal networks structured through digital
platforms are not only than building blocks to a larger collectivity; they are themselves new
organizational structures that have, in part, been absorbed by long-standing institutions like
the DSA (Bennett and Segerberg 2012, p. 753). As the next section will explore,
understandings of how the DSA grew with the events of the 2016 election and its fallout
commonly deny the agency of digital platforms, overlooking this new networked structure,
and its implications for the formal organizations into which it is partially absorbed.
DSA’s Growth: 2016-2018
Over the course of the 2016 election through the 2018 midterm elections, the DSA
saw its membership increase at rates not seen for half a century, with the number of dues-
paying members rising from 6,500 in the fall of 2014 to 8,500 by election day in November
2016
(Schwartz 2017). In the nine months following Trump‘s election, its membership reached
over 13,000 (Schwartz 2017). Finally, a third wave of growth followed the midterm elections
in 2018, when DSA-member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won New York‘s 14th Congressional
District, beating out long-time incumbent Joe Crowley. Ocasio-Cortez, who had been an
organizer with the Sanders‘ campaign in 2016, brought renewed national media attention to
the DSA, whose membership increased by another 4,000 in the week following her victory
(Siu 2018). To date, there are over 60,000 dues-paying members nationally, over an eight-fold
increase since before the 2016 election, with the majority of new members being between
18 to 35 years old (Sernatinger 2019). Though this number seems quite small when viewed
in a national context,
DSA member and Jacobin staff writer Meagan Day (2019) observes, ―While these new
socialist recruits represent a small number of the people whose political outlooks were
transformed by
Sanders‘ candidacy, they represent an enormous percentage of the organized socialist left.‖
Thus, the DSA experienced unprecedented growth, bringing in a new generation of
membership. As Day (2019) notes, the explosive growth of the DSA in the wake of the 2016
election was not a foregone conclusion. Rather, it was contingent on many actors, including
DSA members who strategized, planned, and organized action around recruitment through
the Sanders‘ campaign, and, importantly the agency of digital platforms in bringing together
and structuring a new form of collectivity.
In accounts of the DSA‘s growth, however, social media platforms are generally
conceived of as passive tools for DSA members to instrumentalize for their own ends. As
Barnes
(2020, p. 33) argues, the affordances of digital platforms were crucial for the organization‘s
expansion, as it was conducive to its philosophy of ―meeting the people where they are at‖
in order to make socialism accessible to everyone. Similarly, the DSA‘s National Director
Maria
Svart acknowledged Twitter‘s importance as a source of membership, saying it allowed a
wider audience to have encounters with socialist discourse, not just from accounts formally
affiliated with the DSA (Barnes 2020, p. 34). Through the platform, people could easily see
socialist critiques of current events, especially as the 2016 election was unfolding. Andrew
Porter, a DSA member of the Columbus, Ohio chapter observes:
―Right now, if you sign onto Twitter it‘s pretty easy to get an idea of… why
Democrats were failing and why they weren‘t able to offer a real alternative, that
was kind of everywhere to see. And luckily we had people promoting DSA as an
alternative in conjunction with that...Whereas when I got involved, we had a
website. It was not very good. But we had one, and you didn‘t really hear or see
the same sort of analysis that you‘re able to see really easily now. You kind of
had to go digging for it. So fewer people were exposed to it, or had to grapple
with these ideas‖ (Porter 2020).
In tandem with the strategy of using Sanders‘ campaign to grow the organization, the DSA
could also tap into Bernie Sanders‘ popularity on his own social media accounts in order to
gain exposure (Stigler 2020). Out of all the 2016 candidates, Sanders had the highest rate of
engagement with his followers across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, according to a
study by social media analytics platform Captiv8 (Chaykowski 2016). Though his total
number of followers across the three platforms, 5.7 million, trailed behind Donald Trump at
14.1 million, and Hillary Clinton at 9.3 million, Sanders led in engagement, measured as likes
per follower (Chaykowski 2016). The study also found that candidates who appeal most to
millennial generation voters will have the highest digital response, illustrated by Sanders‘
capture of the 1729 year old vote (Chaykowski 2016), which is also reflective of the influx of
younger DSA members. These accounts recognize the importance of social media platforms
in recruiting new members through exposing more people to socialist discourse. However,
these perspectives view social media as a passive tool to be instrumentalized in the greater
scheme of the DSA‘s electoral strategies, overlooking how, as actors in their own right, digital
platforms fundamentally reconfigure the collectivity and make possible new, constitutive
digital network repertoires. In some ways, digital social networks have been
recognized for their crucial role in recruitment and expansion of the organization, beginning
to hint at these new forms of action and structures of collectivity, although human agency
and conscious decision making are still centered. Recounting their personal journey from
initially deciding to join the DSA to an elected member on its National Political Committee,
Erika Paschold (2020) of Lincoln, Nebraska says they officially signed up to be a dues-paying
member the day after the 2016 election after seeing a friend from California post about the
DSA on Twitter. They remember, ―I found out about it [on Twitter] and I just kind of joined on
a whim because, again, I was just feeling really frustrated, like I needed to do something
completely different politically.‖ After they had joined, the DSA national office had set up a
Facebook group for the surge of new members, ―which was wild because it was just a
bunch of people who had no frame of reference and no relationship with each other and they
were all just posting…‖ (Paschold 2020). In the group, Paschold commented on a post asking
where members were from, finding another individual who said he was also from Lincoln.
From there, he and Paschold connected, planning a meeting at the end of the month. This
meeting was the first of what would become the Lincoln DSA chapter, though at the time it
was ―just a group of people trying to get something started‖ (Paschold 2020). Thus, as this
account reveals, digital platforms play an integral role in not only introducing people to the
DSA and its ideas, but they also work alongside human actors to structure the organization
and guide action through the networks they support and the repertoires of action into which
they are integrated.
Digital Network Repertoires: Debates and New Possibilities
DSA members‘ perceptions of social media is not entirely positive, with many
individuals critiquing its negative impacts on the organization. These debates among
members again frame digital platforms as tools that need to be used in the ―best‖ way
possible (if they are to be used at all) in order to further DSA strategy or socialist goals in
general. However, what these debates actually reveal is a contestation over digital network
repertoires, which in turn inform how the collectivity is assembled. As Chadwick (2007, p.
286) has argued, the ways in which platforms are integrated into different modes of action
fundamentally shapes what it means to be a participant in a political organization.
Critiques of social media usage of the left recognize the contradictions inherent in
digital platforms as privately-owned public spaces, noting the negative consequences for
socialist movements. In a 2018 piece in Jacobin entitled ―Log Off,‖ Benjamin Fong argues
that socialists should give up social media, saying addiction to screens would be
problematic enough even without the capital accumulation of technology corporations.
However, he writes, the phenomenon of addiction is ―a direct manifestation of the
alienation we experience under capitalism,‖ so that digital platforms pose an imminent
threat to the left by attracting people
―who are natural fodder for socialist politics and then absorbs them in the unthinking
narcissism of pseudo-political statement procurement, where they enter the negative
feedback loop that distances them from the reality of everyday human engagement‖ (Fong
2018). On the other hand, Day rebutts his argument in her response, ―Unfortunately, We
Can‘t Log Off,‖ saying that to do so would be to ―relinquish the social media sphere to our
class enemies‖ (Day 2018). Offering solutions to the problems Fong outlined, she suggests
severing the ―self‖ and the
―avatar‖ by viewing Twitter profiles not as an extension of oneself, but as a propaganda tool
for ―persuasion and promotion‖ (Day 2018). She says socialists should also focus more on
institutional social media accounts, which further the ―collective propaganda effort‖ (Day
2018). Despite their disagreements, both Fong and Day recognize the need for socialists to
resist the process of atomization they argue is inherent in social media‘s design, with Day
proposing different modes of action and engagement with digital platforms to overcome to
harmful effects of their design.
On a more practical level, members have also debated the usefulness of social media
platforms for recruitment and communication between members. In general, Svart has
discussed the advantages and disadvantages of Twitter for attracting membership, saying
while it has helped increase the number of dues-paying members, it also has caused the
demographics of new members to skew younger, not being representative of the working
class as a whole (Barnes 2020, p. 36). For further growth and the ability to diversify beyond
white, college educated individuals, Paschold (2020) says the DSA needs to move away from
social media tactics and focus more on attracting members through housing and
environmental campaigns. At the national level, there has been a debate about how to funnel
resources into online recruitment versus in-person approaches (Paschold 2020). Among
DSA members, individuals have reported anxiety about posting the ―right kind of message‖
online, in some cases causing them to not participate in conversations (Barnes 20202, p.
39). While humor online has been recognized as a means for bonding the socialist
community and normalizing its critiques, Barnes (2020, p. 39) has found that the typical
demographics of people posting socialist humor tend to be young, male, and well-educated.
As this demographic develops its own codes and inside jokes, affective bonds within the
group are enhanced while outsiders are increasingly alienated. Recognizing the danger of
online socialist culture, Svart has said, ―...if we‘re trying to build a mass movement, we can‘t
have a club-- we just need to speak the language that the people speak‖ (Barnes 2020, p.
39). Furthermore, social media has also been criticized as an inappropriate venue for in-depth
political discussion, a characterization seemingly at odds with digital platforms‘ perceived ability to
expose a wider audience to socialist discourse. Twitter as a medium, Porter (2020) says, can push
conversations towards people ―just being snarky‖ with each other, while Stigler (2020) says, ―I do
see sometimes, chapters or perhaps people pretending to be chapters, and their accounts fighting
people in the mentions of things, or you know quote tweeting things to dunk on them…‖ As these
contradictory and complementary understandings of social media show, the DSA as an institution is
attempting to fit these new modes of political organization and action into its existing institutional
framework as members debate which modes of action to absorb and which to reject.
As the case of the DSA illustrates, existing political institutions must deal with the
task of absorbing digital interpersonal networks into their long standing organization, which
also entails either integrating or rejecting new digital network repertoires that are
constitutive of these networks. Importantly, absorbing these networks and their constitutive
practices involves not only the human actors within the networks, but the technological
agents that animate the networks as well. The DSA‘s recruitment of unprecedented
numbers through Twitter, and its subsequent use of platforms like Facebook to organize the
influx of newcomers demonstrates how digital interpersonal networks, rather than being
building blocks to an enlarged formal institution, become integrated into that institution,
fundamentally changing its organizational form (Bennett and Segerberg 2012, p. 753). As
Chadwick (2007, p. 296) has noted, these new forms are categorically not cases of ―a
traditional membership-based interest group that has simply ―discovered‖ the Internet.‖
New forms of political action that are constitutive of these networks arise from human actors
integrating digital platforms into their personal expression. These forms of expression are
specific to the platform, as seen when Stigler (2020) speaks of
DSA members ―quote tweeting to dunk on‖ political opposition, or in the trend of DSA
members putting red rose emojis, long a symbol associated with international socialist
movements, into their Twitter profiles (Speedy 2017). These digital network repertoires
inform what it means to be a member of an organization (Chadwick 2007, p. 286), as DSA
members develop particular practices, codes of language, and modes of constructing
collective identity that are mediated by digital platforms.
Debates among members about how the organization should use social media
present platforms as tools to be instrumentalized and tamed for strategic purposes, but they
are also indicative of a deeper debate about what it means to be a DSA member. The
dynamics of platforms as privately-owned public spaces is new political terrain that
institutions must navigate, posing unique contradictions to the DSA as an organization that
is at its core opposed to capitalism, as demonstrated by the Fong (2018) and Day (2018)
articles in Jacobin. However, recognizing the agency of platforms in constituting this new
organization form also reveals the lack of complete control human participants in the
organization have when it comes to defining and assembling the collectivity.
Conclusion
Leading up to the 2016 primaries, DSA members consciously adopted the strategy to
build their organization through the Sanders‘ campaign, actively seeking to avoid perceived
failures of their involvement in Jesse Jackson‘s 1988 campaign. These tactics seem
characteristic of the institutional versatility of the DSA, as throughout its history it has
functioned as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, an activist organization, an
educational network for socialists, and even, according to Porter (2020) as social clubs when
chapter membership was too low to organize political action. Its unprecedented growth in
membership from 2016 to 2018 was due in part to its close work on the Sanders‘ campaign
and attention from Ocasio-Cortez‘s congressional victory, but changes in the organization
were also due to the agency of digital platforms as actors working in tandem with human
actors.
Through the work of digital platforms, the transformation of the DSA was not only in
terms of its number of dues-paying members. Digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter
gave rise to an entirely new organizational structure through what Bennett and Segerberg
(2012) call connective action, in which political action becomes a form of personal
expression online, through individuals showing support for certain ideas, values, policies,
campaigns, etc. These actions are then algorithmically shared to that individual‘s
connections and mutual connections, building a network of those who also relate to the
same ideas and values (Bennett and Segerberg 2012, p. 753). These online political actions,
or what Chadwick (2007, p. 286) calls digital network repertoires, are thus constitutive of this
new networked structure, informing what it means to be a participant in that collectivity. This
new form of collectivity and the novel modes of assembling it are not specific to the DSA, but
the DSA is representative of a long standing institution that has needed to absorb them into
its existing structures. Debates among DSA members about how best to utilize social media
overlook the agency of digital platforms in shaping the organization itself. While these
debates are ostensibly focused on how best to instrumentalize digital platforms, they also
represent the organization‘s efforts to decide how to absorb the new collectivity, which
practices of constituting it to accept, and which to discard.
Conclusion
How Digital Platforms Reconfigure Politics
Digital Platforms as Actor-Networks
This thesis has sought to address the need for a further theorization on how digital
platforms are actively reconfiguring political actors and their constitutive political actions.
Existing approaches to studying the impact of digital platforms show how humans often take
the credit for the work of objects, as seen in accounts of platforms as a recruitment tools for
political organizations that usually operate on the margins of the national political stage such
as the DSA (Barnes 2020) or accounts that treat social media as a means by which far-right
actors inject their white nationalist discourse into mainstream media (Heikkila 2017). As
seen in the example of Diamond and Silk, digital platforms are also seen as tools through
which individuals can monetize their political speech, rise to fame through clicks and likes,
and gain access to traditionally powerful political institutions (Legum 2018; Stuart 2016). In
the wake of the
Cambridge Analytica and ―fake news‖ scandals of the 2016 election, debates about how
government should regulate social media companies has revealed a contradiction between
digital platforms‘ status as privately-owned public spaces (Puetz 2015, p. 403). This gap
needs to be explored more thoroughly as it is productive of new relations between actors
that cannot be viewed solely through the lens of user exploitation and extraction of personal
data for corporate profit.
Thus, adopting the view of ANT where all actors as seen as complex and contingent
assemblages opens up a new avenue of analysis that can show how all of these phenomena,
rather than occurring discretely from each other, are interconnected in traceable ways, as
digital platforms actively reconfigure what appears as the ―political.‖ By adopting the
ontology of ANT, which sees the world as made up of traceable chains of association
between different actors, it becomes possible to overcome the shortcomings of the
approaches highlighted above (Latour 1996, p. 369). Through viewing humans and
technology as actors that are composed of complex networks rather than as unified entities,
the analysis can then open these networks up to examine actors‘ constitutive parts, showing
how new associations are constructed. Empirically tracing how new associations are
constructed illustrates how the political is assembled, rather than assuming the ―political‖
as a taken-for-granted, already existing sphere.
As Latour (2005, p. 69) notes, tracing the associations between humans and
nonhuman actors reveals how asymmetries of power are established. Rather than ascribing
dynamics of power and domination to social ties or norms, they are the result of a series of
agencies, chain reactions, and contingent interactions that must continually be performed.
Thus, ANT can help explain how digital platforms give rise to new relations of power whose
formations are distinctly novel. Furthermore, ―following the actors,‖ as Latour (1990 p. 123)
recommends, requires setting aside definitions and norms that are external to the actors‘
own accounts of their reality. Instead of imposing classifications and categorizations on the
analysis, the researcher must see how the actors make sense of these shifting chains of
associations as they seek to render their own understanding dominant in relation to other
actors‘ contradictory accounts. Thus, power, norms, and distinctive groupings are a result of
the work carried out to maintain associations between actors, rather than the explanations
for action.
Key Conclusions
As this thesis has demonstrated, digital platforms are complex assemblages
composed of many connected and contingent parts. Algorithms, interface, corporate
executives, stock structure, business models, content moderation policies, and a litany of
other actors come together in a complex chain of association to compose what appears as
a singular entity, such as the Facebook platform. Opening up this entity shows how these
constitutive parts make digital platforms act in certain ways, while platforms themselves,
when integrated into the assemblages of other actor-networks, in turn make these actors
behave in ways that alter a given state of affairs. Importantly, these chains of associations
are sets of relations between the various links, where work must constantly be done in order
to uphold the connections (van Dijck 2013, p. 26). In this way, digital platforms and
the parts that constitute them have made sociality technical (van Dijck 2013, p. 12), where
what appears as the ―social‖ is the effect of a dominant techno-economic materiality
(Couldry and van Dijck 2015, p. 3). As explored in the first chapter, technology executives
have played a key role in constructing digital platforms as infrastructure to channel the
social, where human relations that occur in the ―offline‖ world are presented as naturally
shifting to the digital realm. For example, Facebook‘s mission to give people the power to
build a global community and Twitter‘s initiative to encourage healthier conversations and
debates exemplify how executives conceptualize their work as serving the public interest
through encouraging or safeguarding desirable, naturally-occurring human relations through
the use of artificial intelligence to either recommend Groups for users or track metrics to
determine conversation ―health.‖ However, what these examples reveal is that
relationships between users on digital platforms are inherently engineered and platform-
specific; ―friending‖ someone on
Facebook or ―following‖ them on Twitter, joining a Group or tweeting/ retweeting at another
account are types of connections between users that are generated by the platform itself.
These concepts did not exist before social media companies invented them, demonstrating
how platforms redefine the social through ―new infrastructures of association‖ rather than
serving as a gathering place for some already existing sense of connectedness or collectivity
(Couldry and van Dijck 2015, p. 3). Thus, actions that are conceptualized as social, such as
engaging in discussions or being part of a community are rendered formal, manageable, and
manipulable by technology, for the purpose of the corporation‘s profit (van Dijck 2013, p. 12).
As chapter one noted, controversies about ―free speech‖ on social media reveals a
gap between old conceptions of terms like ―free speech‖ and public space and the new
materiality of which they are composed. As ANT would propose, ―speech‖ and the
―speaker‖ are not singular, bounded categories, but rather are complex assemblages,
actor-networks whose constitutive parts must be taken apart from each other and examined.
―Speech‖ itself is not a floating concept; it is a specific material formation that can be
traced. In other words, simply put, the medium of the speech matters. Critical commentary
on Republicans‘ allegations that social media companies violate users‘ rights to free
expression by censoring conservative viewpoints has argued that there is a distinction
between freedom of speech and freedom of reach; while people have the right to say what
they want on social media, they do not have the right to have the visibility of the message
boosted by those platforms‘ algorithms (Diresta 2018). However, reach is already built into
the material composition of speech online. ―Reach‖ is not a separate category from
speech, but it is a link in the chain of action of which ―speech‖ on digital platforms is
composed.
Thus, when actors refer to ―freedom of speech‖ online, what they are referring to is a
particular rendering of a new materiality. A similar process is at work when actors such as
executives of technology companies draw analogies between their platforms and town
squares, which are public, government-owned spaces where the government cannot restrict
citizens‘ First Amendment rights to free speech (Leetaru 2017). Rather, they are assigning
this label to an entirely new techno-economic formation, attempting to bring some of the
connotations of the old use of the term to its new usage. Thus, categories such as speaker,
speech, and public spaces are in the process of being reconfigured through the integration
of digital platforms into their composition. Such controversies as debates about free speech
on social media represent efforts by different actors seeking to render their understandings
of these terms, as they pertain to new chains of action being brought into being, stable in
relation to others‘ competing understanding. This constitutes a new politics, where new
actors are coming into being, and new relations of power and dominance between them are
being assembled.
Building on this, chapter two has illustrated how digital platforms have given rise to
new forms of power and authority, with technology companies and their executives wielding
a great deal of control over platforms‘ millions, even billions, of users. As explained by Weihe
(2017), platform founders occupy an unprecedented position of power within their
corporations. Her conceptualization of ―founder primacy‖ refers to how founders are
―afforded significant control that overrides institutional investors, public shareholders, and
even the company‘s own board of directors‖ (Weihe 2017, p. 176-177). Such power arises
from a multi-tiered stock structure, in which certain categories of stock are given greater
voting rights compared to the others, concentrating voting power in a small group of
corporate insiders. Multi-tiered stock structures are themselves a historically novel
phenomenon contrasted with past models of shareholder democracy in which shareholders
are given one vote per share they own (Hayden and Bodie 2010, p. 2087), and are particularly
common among technology companies. Exemplary of this new formation of ―founder
primacy‖ is Mark Zuckerberg, who is Facebook‘s founder, CEO, board chair, and controller
of the majority of voting power among shareholders, owning 58 percent of the company‘s
class B stock, which gets 10 votes per share as compared to class A stock‘s one vote per
share (Durkee 2019). Effectively, the only way to reduce Zuckerberg‘s power in the company
is for him to willingly give it up. However, as this thesis has argued, founder primacy extends
beyond unchecked control over the company‘s corporate structure.
Founder primacy is also indicative of the autocratic power Zuckerberg exercises over
Facebook‘s billions of users. This power is assembled not only from the multi-tiered stock
structure and his joint position as CEO and board chair; an essential link in the chain of
associations of which this power is constructed is the platform itself.
Technology corporations‘ reliance on selling user data for profit has led to their need
to govern behavior on their platforms in order to maximize the profitability of this behavior,
producing new relations of power and domination that are understood by both platform
users and platform owners outside of purely economic terms (Schwarz 2019, p. 127). As
platforms configure the social into bundles of data points for companies to sell, they also
produce what
Schwarz (2019, p. 126) has called ―generalized social capital‖ for their users. Social capital
in the traditional sense refers to the relationships, group membership, and network position
that an individual can convert into economic resources, vital information, or political power
(Schwarz 2019, p. 123). Digital platforms render this social capital concrete, knowable,
trackable, and manipulable through the activities such as liking, sharing, viewing,
retweeting, and so on (Schwarz 2019, p. 126). As long as users conform to the behavioral
norms of the platform and adhere to its content policies and community standards, they
have access to this generalized social capital. Violation of these standards and policies can
result in being cut off from generalized social capital in the form of being suspended,
banned, or otherwise restricted on the platform. Through the promise of being able to
accumulate social capital, platform owners are able to govern their communities by relying
on platform users to comply with whatever terms and conditions the company sets forth, no
matter how opaquely these terms are decided and implemented.
Digital platforms have also become a part of the formation of a new actor that is
governed by this novel founder primacy. This new actor is governed, yet also makes demands
of the governing platform owners based on a ―social contract‖ between them, bound
through the user data/ generalized social capital the platform generates. As chapter two
argues, political entrepreneurs are actors who are able to monetize or otherwise profit from
the political speech on digital platforms, exemplified by the example of Diamond and Silk.
However, it is not just their speech that is commodifiable; it is their platformed self that
becomes a commodity. As scholars of social media marketing have noted, their is a
relationship between practices of self branding and the expansion of neoliberal governance
in which subjects are empowered to ―conceive of themselves as entrepreneurial subjects,
responsible for the success or failure of their own conduct, ultimately maintaining the
‗formal game of inequalities‘ on which the neoliberal order is based‖ (Bandinelli and
Arvidsson 2012, p. 68). This is especially true of self-branding on digital platforms, where
everyone purportedly has an equal opportunity to reach viral fame, as platforms are open to
conceivably any individual to make a profile and post content. Thus, the threat of losing
access to generalized social capital is detrimental to actors who actively seek to self-brand
on digital platforms. Their ability to cultivate and leverage this social capital, which can have
tremendous consequences in the ―offline‖ world, is tied to their ability to fulfill the role of a
―good‖ citizen, behaving in accordance with the norms of the platform and adhering to its
content policies. When platform citizens feel as though their rights have been violated by the
governing corporation, debates about ―freedom of speech‖ on social media ensue.
Finally, the third chapter of this thesis discusses how digital platforms become
integrated into the formation of new kinds of political collectivities, transforming long
standing political institutions that absorb these new collectivities. As Bennett and Segerberg
(2012) have argued, platforms like Twitter and Facebook give rise to new organizational
structures, in which political action becomes a form of personal expression online as
individuals show support for certain ideas, values, policies, and campaigns. These personal
expressions are then shared to that individual‘s connections, mutual connections, and then
possibly beyond their own personal circle, to build a network of people who also relate to
those same ideas and values (Bennett and Segerberg 2012, p. 753). These digital network
repertoires (Chadwick 2007, p. 286) constitute the new organizational structure, informing
what it means to be a member of that collectivity. Through the case study of the DSA, chapter
three demonstrated how existing political institutions are impacted by these actions, though
humans often take credit for the work of technology through characterizing digital platforms
as passive tools for organization members to strategically deploy. Debates among DSA
members about how best to utilize social media overlook the agency of digital platforms in
shaping the organization itself. While these debates are ostensibly focused on how best to
instrumentalize digital platforms, they also represent the organization‘s efforts to decide
how to absorb the new collectivity, which practices of constituting it to accept, and which to
discard. Therefore, this chapter also opens up new questions to research as the longer-term
effects of digital platforms being integrated into the formation of political institutions unfold.
For example, what happens to the autonomy of an organization as its repertoires of action
become increasingly oriented toward digital platforms, which, as this thesis has thoroughly
examined, are far from neutral infrastructures? As Couldry
(2015, p. 608) writes, ―‗the myth of us‘ on digital platforms encourages us to believe that
our gatherings on social media platforms are a natural form of expressive collectivity, even
though it is exactly that belief that is at the basis of such platforms‘ creation of economic
value.‖ Thus, as organizations absorb these digitally-constituted collectivities, they also are
absorbing the digital platform as an actor-network in all of its complex, constitutive parts.
Broader Applications
While the focus of this thesis has been highly specific to the United States and the
events of the 2016 presidential election to the present, its theoretical approach and broader
conclusions about the nature of human and technological actors could provide new ways
for analyzing similar patterns in other countries and contexts. Scholars such as Moffitt and
Tormey (2013, p. 387) have sought to understand the contemporary rise of populism across
the globe as a
―political style,‖ arguing that in today‘s highly mediatized landscape, performative features
of politics are increasingly important. Indeed, the formation of new far-right actors is not a
phenomenon particular to the United States. Studies such as Krzyzanowski and Ledin‘s
(2016, p. 572) examine the rise of ―uncivil society‖ on the web in different European
countries, noting the relationship between far-right digital platforms and ―offline‖ activists
and members of parliaments. Similarly, Wodak and Krzyzanowski (2017, p. 474) have argued
that mediatization and self-mediatization have been major factors behind the rise of far-right
populists from Trump to Viktor Orban, though each must be studied as distinct and context-
dependent cases. Thus, these approaches could be augmented by the approach presented
in this thesis, which would allow for detailed, empirical accounts of how digital platforms
and human actors interact in order to lead to new political formations.
Furthermore, the technological work of reconfiguring the social is not limited to social
media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which this thesis was primarily concerned
with. While these platforms introduce new relations of exploitation and governance through
the creation of personal data for companies and generalized social capital for users, other
types of platforms create different relations of dominance. Cockayne (2016, p. 74) has
studied how the discourse of ―sharing‖ perpetuated by firms such as Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb
is mutually constitutive of new economic practices in which labor is devalued and
precarious work is normalized, reproduced, and romanticized by these firms. More generally,
Fisher (2010, p. 235) has conceptualized the ―digital discourse‖ as a hegemonic body of
knowledge that ―explains the structure and dynamics of contemporary society as arising
from the structure and dynamics of network technology.‖ These discursive approaches
could be augmented with insights from ANT, which would explain in material terms how
these new structures and dynamics are assembled. Importantly, while these firms are
founded in the United States, they conduct business transnationally, suggesting that the way
their platforms transform lives for users in the United States also has implications for users
in other locations.
The Ongoing Battle over Sociality
This thesis has illustrated how digital platforms have (re)configured a completely new
politics based on a techno-economic formation that has changed the very basis of the
―social.‖
As with mass media that were dominant before, Couldry (2015, p. 619) writes, ―it is not that
social media corporations literally provide a social centre, but that our everyday social
interactions are becoming increasingly oriented to the spaces and pathways from which that
those corporations own, sustain and profit.‖ As demonstrated above, new actors come into
being as digital platforms and their constitutive parts are integrated into new chains of
action, and new relations of power and dominance are then assembled through these chains
of action that connect both human and nonhuman actors. However, these are sets of
relations that must be constantly performed. Thus, the process of reconfiguring the social is
a highly contingent and ongoing process. As technology continues to develop, and
continuous data collection and large-scale data processing increasingly dictates the
management of various area of life (Couldry and Mejias 2019, p. 341), it is crucial to continue
to ask how digital platforms work to reconfigure the very basis of life as we know it. As van
Dijck (2013, p. 20) writes, the ―new norms for sociality and values of connectivity are not
the outcome but the very stake in the battle to conquer the vast new territory of connective
media and cultivate its fertile grounds.‖ Thus, it is important to not let the ―social,‖ as
whatever new configurations of it are rendered stable by actors, become a taken-for-granted
category, as it is a site of continuous action that is governed by fluid
assemblages of humans and technology.
