This article introduces the concept of predatory communities – communities engineered for value extraction within the platform economy. In contrast to conventional understandings of online communities as emergent social formations, we examine how individuals and organizations can exploit specific mechanisms to scaffold and facilitate community sentiments and commodification through predatory strategies. Grounded in a synthesis of sociological literature, internet studies, and platform scholarship, we define predatory communities and use three case studies involving social media influencers and finance-related platforms to illustrate the deployment of three predatory strategies: predatory inclusion, obfuscated brokerage relationships, and turning prey into predators through recruitment. The article explores the inherent contradictions between the affective dimensions of community membership and the economic imperatives driving predatory practices, analysing how individuals and organizations exploit platform infrastructures to construct and maintain predatory communities. We argue for a critical interrogation of the community concept, its related mechanisms, and the values and interests embedded within platformized communities.

In January 2021, the shares of the brick-and-mortar video games retail chain GameStop exploded in value. At the same time, billboards on highways and ads in Times Square in New York City used cryptic visuals and seemingly meaningless emojis with diamonds and rockets. Mainstream media soon had an explanation: This was the story of how the subreddit r/wallstreetbets had mobilized thousands of retail investors in a fight against evil hedge funds. Based on a case study of r/wallstreetbets and the GameStop incident, we analyze how idiosyncratic internet culture was incorporated into a broadly resonant and emotionally inflected narrative that lionized the ‘little man’, focusing on both individual profits and collective grievances. Through a theoretical framework combining sociological theories of internet culture and framing analysis, we identify an overall communication structure that drew on three interconnected discursive layers: idiocultural memes, investment-specific information, and a moralized, collectivized injustice frame with heroes and villains. We further argue that the GameStop (GME) incident instantiates a case of the politicization of personal finance, where the investment practices and strategies of ordinary people were transformed into a political issue. As such, the article makes two contributions to the existing literature. First, we contribute to the nascent literature on internet cultures related to personal finance by looking at a specific subreddit devoted to stock trading and investing. Second, we show how idiocultural elements, such as emojis and memes, can function both as contested and exclusionary material aimed at insiders and as flexible components of communications framed for broad mobilization through emotionally resonant notions of grievance and injustice.

Recommender systems are dynamic systems used across digital platforms that personalize curation based on the individuals’ history of interactions. News recommender systems (NRSs) can enhance personal relevance and loyalty while reducing the power laws of curation. However, NRSs also denote a displacement of editorial agency and control due to technical complexity and limited transparency in personalized exposure. This study aims to bridge the gap between algorithmic curation and editorial control through a conceptual exploration of dashboards as a dynamic evaluation approach allowing translation between the personalized exposure and the situated realities of editors. We demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of dashboards by configuring three theoretically driven views on news recommendations based on a dataset containing personalized recommendations presented to audiences of a Scandinavian tabloid news site. The theories used are agenda-setting, uses and gratifications, and news repertoires. The construction of dashboards informs a discussion about how theoretical ideas about news use are informing for how evaluation approaches are pre- and configured, but also their potentials of refiguring the editorial control in algorithmic curation.

This article asks how our capacities to conduct critical research on digital power are influenced by depending, empirically and methodologically, on powerful market actors controlling the underlying research infrastructure. Building on discussions at the intersection between digital methods, political economy and infrastructure studies, we zoom in on three cases of widely used commercial data tools and repositories for academic studies. Mapping out their methods and applications, we ask of each case: Who owns and offers it? What is (not) measured? And, how is it mobilized in existing research? We thereby explore how they each contribute to the construction of knowledge by setting the standards for measuring, monitoring and ultimately regulating digital power. We conclude that the constructions of digital research infrastructures should be placed at the centre of our investigations – as objects of analysis and as research findings in and by themselves.

In this article, we examine the emerging phenomenon of financial influencers, or “finfluencers”, in the context of platformised personal finance and influencer monetisation strategies. As retail trading platforms have democratised access to financial markets, influencers on digital media platforms have carved out a niche as popular experts who provide financial advice and investment strategies. The article presents a typology of four prominent influencer strategies – influencer classic, academy operator, platformised trader, and veiled promoter – where each strategy identifies a distinct configuration of types of expertise calibrated towards monetisation of distinct audiences and requisite products and services. Building on analyses of empirical examples from Denmark, our study contributes to the theoretical understanding of expertise and addresses an empirical gap in financial influencer research. It also contributes to the general discussion around influencers as emerging sources of authority in society.

Platforms often champion user value as the primary objective to optimize for in recommender systems. However, as commercial marketplaces platforms must also balance the interests of other stakeholders, such as advertisers, creators, investors, and regulators. This easily creates conflicts of interest - whose value is more important to consider in recommendation systems. To address this issue, I develop a moral economy framework to platform studies that integrates studies of content recommendation with theories of fair allocation of recourses. Drawing on examples from digital media platforms, I show how three prominent rentier mechanisms shape which kind of content and creators that are likely to gain visibility, attract attention and conversely, acquire economic capital. The findings demonstrate that platforms often override user agency by promoting the content the platforms want users to see, blur distinctions between organic and paid recommendations, and create artificial scarcity by favoring commercially lucrative creators. These practices raise concerns about the sustainability of original content production versus standardized and derivative output, fueled in part by generative AI, and the marginalization of critical and diverse voices. As platforms continue to dominate digital media distribution, their moral economies warrant closer scrutiny to preserve original, diverse and critical perspectives in society

This article examines the emergence of platformised multi-level marketing (MLM) schemes as a significant, yet understudied, phenomenon in the ongoing transformation of work and labour on digital platforms. Promising wealth, freedom, and community, platformised MLMs organise individuals into cycles of value extraction by leveraging aspirational narratives of financial independence and entrepreneurial success. Through a case study of iGenius, a global MLM firm working through local recruiters, the article analyses the strategic and progressive embedding of individuals into the MLM. The article focuses on the cyclic character of recruitment operations, and identifies three stages of the process, namely recruitment of customers on social media platforms, the commodification of customers through complex and obfuscated brokerage relationships with affiliate trading platforms, and, finally, the embedding of individuals into the MLM organisation as recruiters seeking new prospects, starting the process over again. Throughout the analysis, we show how the nature of work, the value extraction methods, and the control mechanisms intensify as people move from merely subscribing to engaging in financial trading and in the end, turning to recruitment for the MLM. In the concluding discussion, we situate the analytical findings in the broader discussion of precarious work relations and atomisation of the workforce as well as the broader context of investment schemes and online scams. Thus, the article contributes to the study of labour relations and data extraction relationships on platforms and in the digital economy more generally.

This chapter applies classic organization theory to outline inherent legitimacy issues with the multi-sided market model of digital media platforms. Drawing on resource dependence and institutional theory, it argues that the lean outsourced platform structure is highly efficient but creates problems of legitimacy. Using YouTube as an illustrative case, it outlines three key legitimacy problems arising from mismatches between platform operations and environmental demands: problematic content, users and practices. It discusses YouTube’s strategic response as a shift from pure advertising intermediary towards cultivation of brand-safe and highly aligned creators integrated with e-commerce. The chapter concludes that integrating insights from organizational theory can explain how the platform model’s pursuit of efficiency leads to compromised legitimacy, requiring evolution of the model itself.

In this introductory chapter we address the concept of platform as it has been developed in the context of platform studies. We identify four overarching themes in the study of platforms: materiality, operations, economic framing, and governance. In extension of this we present two principles for situating platforms: historicizing and provincializing platforms. The first concerns the historically specificities of platforms in the form of predecessors and historical trajectories, while the second concerns the specific economic, social and cultural contexts that shape platforms. We argue that applying these dimension to the study of platforms bring attention characteristics and phenomena that otherwise remain hidden. Finally, we present the individual chapters of the volume and how they play into our ambition of historicizing and provincializing platforms.

Retail trading platforms have gained popularity in recent years as brokers for ordinary people to trade speculative assets such as stocks and cryptocurrencies. These platforms earn revenue from their users’ risky trading and through derivative products, where the platform benefits as the traders lose. The platforms thus operate with conflicts of interest: what is good for the platform and its users are not necessarily the same. We explore how retail trading platforms navigate these conflicts of interest in a case study of the global and multi-asset broker eToro. Through an analysis of three different types of brokerage — financial, informational, and social — we show how the platform obfuscates its roles and operations to mask underlying conflicts of interest. In the end, we argue that the interweaving of brokerage roles compounds platform power as platforms can exploit their gatekeeping position and information asymmetry to promote their preferred transactions at the expense of users and complementors. The analysis thus contributes both to the specific understanding of retail trading platforms and to the general discussion of conflicts of interest in platform power.

Through guidelines, terms of service and algorithmic curation, digital platforms such as YouTube encourage creators to produce content that fits with the commercial goals of the platform. Scholars have argued that this pressure to conform might lead to uniformity, or isomorphism, in the ways organizations manage their presence on platforms. This article contributes to the debate on isomorphism by taking a bottom-up approach and ask to which extent creators on YouTube pursue similar, or different, strategies for uploading and monetizing content. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses of a sample of YouTube channels, we show how content creators adapt to, negotiate with, and defy institutional pressures. In the end, we find greater support for diversification, that is, polymorphism, than concentration in the ways organizations manage their presence on the platform. This has implications for how we understand platform power and integrate institutional theories in communication research.

Research into the video platform YouTube has argued that so-called creators are faced with difficult working circumstances, much like those in the rest of the cultural industries. Stories of 'YouTuber burnout' have circulated, indicating the consequences of trying to keep up with demands. This article demonstrates the existence of increasing pressures to produce fresh content on the platform, the output imperative, and offers tentative explanations. The article draws on analyses of the cultural industries, digital entrepreneurship, and organizational ecology to deliver a longitudinal analysis of the productivity of YouTube channels. Our sample contains data from app. 22,000 channels and their activities from 2008 to 2019. We focus on three productivity parameters, i.e., the number of videos uploaded, average video length, and total output produced. A series of quantitative analyses demonstrate both general and specific tendencies towards increased productivity during this period. Parts of the channel population saw relatively small changes, but some of the more productive strata of the population saw productivity increases above 800% over 10 years. We show that these developments have been driven primarily by new channels joining the platform and that existing channels tend to follow the benchmarks set by newcomers. This indicates the existence of steadily increasing demands for increased output to stay competitive. Our analyses thus demonstrate the existence of considerable production pressures on YouTube and we argue that this has exacerbated the already precarious position of creators on the video platform.

A dominant way for digital platforms to generate revenue has been through the sale of audiences to advertisers encapsulated by the idea of the attention economy. This model has been challenged in recent years due to competitive and political pressures on platforms. In this paper, we use YouTube as a case to understand how processes of commodification are changing on digital platforms. We demonstrate that YouTube furthers the commodification of content, audiences and creative labour by cultivating commercial interactions, standardising exchange mechanisms and constructing systems of trust. The platform enables producers and retailers to sell digital and physical goods to users, advertisers to capture audiences' interest and brands to establish partnerships with producers. In sum, we show how YouTube not only monetises attention but commodifies all forms of engagement through its marketplaces with consequences for the precarity of users and producers on the platform.

Media are typically understood, in research and in common parlance, as forms of representation – ways and means of rendering diverse aspects of reality in either factual or fictional formats. This chapter focuses on the broader and deeper social structures that are the products, in part, of innumerable distributed acts of communication: Representations and interactions that produce, maintain, repair, and transform reality over time and, increasingly, across space. It lays out different forms of capital, as they relate to human communication, drawing on the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu. The chapter explores an empirical account of the complex process in which communication is capitalized, drawing on the Peoples' Internet surveys to characterize the agency that people exercise daily online as parents, partners, citizens, consumers, patients, religious subjects, and more. It broadens the perspective to consider digital, analog, as well as embodied forms of communication as resources in tackling both mundane choices and pressing dilemmas of everyday life.

The focus of this panel is the material, organizational, and cultural conditions of digital markets. While the notion of economy refers to the more general production, distribution and allocation in society, the idea of markets represents specific contexts of economic exchange typical of capitalist economies (Carruthers & Babb, 2013). A more elaborate understanding of digital markets and their relationships with digital platforms can expand our understanding of the economic implications that specific types of platform architectures have at the level of economic interaction. The discussion takes as a starting point perspectives from economic sociology that emphasize how markets are embedded into broader social and societal structures (Granovetter, 2017) and conditioned upon cultural norms and conventions (Beckert, 2009). In addition, the panel is informed by the way economic sociology and STS have approached the material conditions of markets (Garcia-Parpet, 2007; MacKenzie, 2018) and the way these conditions frame and transform power relations and interaction patterns on specific markets. The panel consists of four papers that approach this issue from a range of perspectives: The relationship between platform architectures, open market strategies and the formation of ‘commodity money’ in the case of Steam, the relationship between platforms, markets, and state regulation in the case of Alibaba, the role of narratives, imagined futures, and collective action that frame patterns of buying and selling in global stock markets in the case of Gamestop shares and, finally, how the online engagement industry is organized in practice in the case of “click farms”.

Global Internet use is circumscribed by local political and economic institutions and inscribed in distinctive cultural practices. This article presents a comparative study of Internet use in China, the United States, and five European countries. The empirical findings suggest a convergence of cultures, specifically regarding interpersonal communication, alongside characteristic national and sociodemographic configurations of different prototypes of human communication. Drawing on the classic understanding of communication as a cultural process producing, maintaining, repairing, and transforming a shared reality, we interpret such configurations as cultures of communication, which can be seen to differ, overlap, and converge across regions in distinctive ways. Looking beyond traditional media systems, we call for further cross-cultural research on the Internet as a generic communication system joining global and local forms of interaction.

This Special Section takes stock of a shift toward an integrated and global digital media environment with a set of articles comparing and contrasting the social uses of the Internet in China, Europe, and the United States. Departing from James Lull's typology of the social uses of television, the articles address both general media use patterns and the specific private and public uses to which the Internet is put in these different social and cultural contexts. A concluding commentary by Lull serves to place current communicative practices in historical perspective and to suggest implications for future research.