Transformative Platform Politics For The Digital Society

Central European Journal of Communication, 2024

This is an edited transcript of the audio recording of the roundtable on Future, Democracy, and Platforms, which was organized at the EUMEPLAT project meeting at Charles University in Prague on 15 January 2024, in collaboration with the MeDeMAP (Mapping Media for Future Democracies) project. The current digital public spaces have been transformed by platformization, and besides the positive consequences such as democratization of communication or access to information, these processes driven by algorithms have brought political, cultural, and economic asymmetries. At the roundtable, we discussed challenges and threats to fostering more democratic platform environments in the future with experts from fields such as digital and economic anthropology or new media philosophy. Among the discussed platform related topics were public and cooperative ownership, the need to strengthen their democracy and imagination or pleasure as the key principles.

Markets, Globalization & Development Review: Vol. 3: No. 3, Article 6., 2019, 2018

Today, we are slowly coming to terms with the fact that online platforms are practically becoming more effective then public institutions in organizing and structuring our public and private lives. Even though public institutions and governments still formally represent the will of the people, civil lives, and in some instances, even public policies are structured through everyday operations and economic modalities of online platforms. José Van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martjin de Waal’s The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World is one of these 'coming to terms’ efforts on the academic front, it aims to analyze and contextualize the social transformations brought about by online platforms at a larger scale, from a global perspective. Available at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/mgdr/vol3/iss3/8 Recommended Citation Keskin, Batuhan (2018) "Van Dijk, Poell, and de Wall, The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World (2018)," Markets, Globalization & Development Review: Vol. 3: No. 3, Article 8.

Media and Communication, 2020

The so-called crisis of representation has formed the theoretical framework of many studies on media and democracy of the past thirty years. Many researches have highlighted the crisis of legitimacy and credibility of the ‘traditional’ parties (Katz & Mair, 2018) and communication was considered, at the same time, one of the causes of acceleration towards post-representative politics (Keane, 2013) but also an indispensable tool for re-connecting citizens to politics. Various phenomena have developed within this framework: a) the birth of political aggregations as a result of mobilization in the digital ecosystem; b) the development of digital platforms for democratic participation; c) the birth of parties defined as ‘digital’ or ‘platform’; and d) the growing centrality of digital political activism, both as a phenomenon within the digital communicative ecosystem (also in the context of social media) and as a result of the transformation of social movements. This article studies the...

Culture Machine

International Journal of Communication, 2020

This article considers challenges to policy and regulation presented by the dominant digital platforms. A radical democratic framing of the deliberative process is developed to acknowledge the full complexity of power relations that are in play in policy and regulatory debates and this view is contrasted with a liberal democratic perspective. We show how these different framings have informed historical and contemporary approaches to the challenges presented by conflicting interests in economic value and a range of public values in the context of media content, communication infrastructure and digital platform policy and regulation. We argue for an agonistic approach to digital platform policy and regulatory debate so as to encourage a denaturalization of the prevailing logics of commercial datafication. We offer some suggestions about how such a generative discourse might be encouraged in such a way that it starts to yield a new common sense about the further development of digital platforms; one that might favor a digital ecology better attuned to consumer and citizen interests in democratic societies.

Media, Culture & Society, 2019

José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal, The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018.

Humanities & social sciences communications, 2024

Global digital platforms have become important actors for economy and work with social policy consequences. This article analyses strategies and actions of global digital platforms from the perspective of how and what kind of global social policy these represent. It draws from analysis of how platform company strategic approaches relate to rights, regulation, and redistribution, and then using abductive reasoning and mixed methods empirical case study in Europe, articulate challenges to future global social policy. It examines what priorities of platform companies imply to global social policy and identifies five political and strategic elements of importance for global social policy: (1) denial or avoidance of employer status, (2) identifying as a "tech company providing services", (3) focus on private social insurance in contrast to statutory social security, (4) addressing social security as a market-based service through voluntary partnerships, and ( ) investor driven business model and global engagement. Drawing from theoretical and empirical data, the article further examines potential countermeasures and solutions, which could be of relevance at different levels of governance. It concludes that social policy impacts of platform economy are more related to the business model than technology. Platform economy business models currently support upward redistribution and avoidance of regulatory measures to address minimum income, social protection, and workers' rights, yet platform economy is data rich and also could provide scope for government and regulatory action.

International Journal of Communication, 2019

This introduction provides an overview of the special issue on digital activism and digital democracy. In particular, it focuses on the most recent empirical and theoretical development in the field. It argues that, albeit similar, the logic between online and offline mobilizations is different; more important, it argues that digital platforms do not organize movements’ demands neutrally. In reviewing the content of the six contributions of the special issues, it highlights the strengths and the shortcomings of both digital mobilizations and digital platforms. Overall, it presents a multifaceted representation of the implications of platform politics, advancing the debate on digital politics on several productive avenues of inquiry.

This two-part work brings together the outcomes of the Horizon 2020 Project PLUS, "Platform Labor in Urban Spaces". Running from December 2018 to March 2022, which included an extension from December 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this research project investigated the main features and dimensions of the impact of digital platforms on the economy and society, with a specific focus on labour, urban transformations, and welfare. Sixteen partners, including universities, research centres, and cooperatives, investigated the operations of four digital platforms (AirBnb, Deliveroo, Helpling, and Uber) in seven European cities

Communications

In retrospect, the communication world was so different in February 2020, when scholarly members of the Euromedia Research Group applied to become a Jean Monnet Network, focusing on media and platform policy (EuromediApp). Shortly after sending off the application, Covid-19 conquered the planet and jeopardized the main objective of networks, namely, to strengthen ties between network nodes. When the three-year network started operating in October 2020, it immediately became clear that dominant features of the pandemic would be fake news and harmful content online. Additionally, it was evident that digital platforms would play an even more central role in opinion-shaping during lockdowns than they had before. During the following three years, it turned out that the concept of the Eurome-diApp network was smart. Focusing on digital platforms, their relations to mass communication, and their performance regarding democracy and human rights allowed the network to organize cutting-edge workshops and conferences. For these events, it invited scholars to contribute scientific state-of-the-art texts and presentations on this fast-moving topic. This special issue of Communications serves to consolidate the learnings from that journey, timely addressing burning issues in digital platform governance. It explores questions such as how to limit hate speech and other harmful content online, how to hold digital platforms accountable for publishing it, how to accommodate automated decision-making (a.k.a. artificial intelligence), and how to economically balance platform profits achieved at the expense of mass media. Several attempts have been made over the last years to allow digital platform communication to thrive within the boundaries of the wider policy concept of