#Aoir2016 Internet Rules!

Still platforms: the apparent stability of digital intermediaries in the face of change and challenge
Tarleton Gillespie (1), Mike Ananny (2), Karine Nahon (3), Angèle Christin (4), Balazs Bodo (5), Solon Barocas (6)
1: Microsoft Research; 2: University of Southern California; 3: Government School, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya-IDC; 4: Data & Society Research Institute; 5: School of Information Law, University of Amsterdam; 6: Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University

Despite fluctuating user communities, continued global expansion, rapidly growing data stores, and competing regulatory regimes, social media platforms have achieved an economic, cultural, and legal permanence uncommon among young media systems. How have they achieved this so quickly? And are they as stable as they appear?
This roundtable focuses on the appearance of platform stability, as achieved through myriad assumptions, experiments, adjustments, and redesigns – ontological “backstage” work by which platforms sustain themselves. We consider the complex and often invisible forces, strategies, and reconfigurations that make platforms look coherent and remain dynamic. This dynamism has been institutionalized, naturalized, and overlooked, by users and producers alike. We bring together scholars studying the sociotechnical work of apparent platform stability along two related lines:
Virality: When trying to explain why information goes viral, it is nearly impossible to separate platforms’ top-down structures from users’ bottom-up activities. As platforms experiment with algorithms and interfaces to sequence content, elicit participation, highlight novelty, and accommodate publishing cycles, they aspire both to set predictable rhythms and spur unpredictable surges. Similarly, as news organizations adopt data analytics, they struggle to orient to and resist audience data, to balance audience awareness and editorial judgment.
Impartiality: In the U.S. and Europe, social media platforms are largely protected from liability for their users. Encouraged to police the internet on the one hand, and celebrated as guardians of digital freedoms on the other, they face conflicting expectations. The scales at which social media platforms operate make them difficult to govern, yet resulting in a stability that harbors bad actors. Performing accountability under these circumstances often means reasserting ontological distinctions between platform and users.
To understand platforms as both mature and contested—and develop more nuanced definitions of “platform”—we propose examining these little-studied forces producing the solidity, coherence, and power of platforms.