Platforms and Power

Reveals how empathy operates differently across platform architectures by comparing Reddit and Stack Exchange communities with matched topics. What counts as appropriate empathetic response is shaped by platform norms and affordances — efficiency-driven spaces may treat emotional support as noise, while support-oriented spaces structurally mandate it. Challenges the assumption that more empathy is universally desirable in platform design.

Also in: methods and tools

Argues that social media platforms are performative network formalisms: they don't merely describe communication but actively shape it through choices about tie symmetry, relation visibility, and information control between relations. What began as an academic method for studying organisational communication has become the very infrastructure through which platforms regulate the flow of communication.

Also in: methods and tools, networks as epistemology

Qualitative analysis of pornography use among British adults reveals how platform-mediated access to sexual content creates new stigma management challenges. Drawing on Meisenbach's theory of stigma management communication, finds that "avoiding" strategies such as hiding use, distancing from stigma, and making favorable comparisons are the dominant response, showing how platform affordances that enable private consumption simultaneously produce new social anxieties about disclosure.

Generative AI systems trained on sufficient images of a person can replicate their likeness without consent, creating a new category of platform-mediated harm. Presents a seven-category taxonomy of harms from synthetic likeness generation and distinguishes generation from distribution as separate vectors requiring distinct policy interventions.

Also in: semantic structures

Also in: semantic structures

Self-disclosure on Reddit creates a trade-off between relatable context and identifiability, since posters who share age and gender receive more tailored advice but become more legible to the platform and its users. The study reveals how Reddit's pseudonymous architecture creates a disclosure economy where personal information becomes a currency exchanged for social support.

Also in: semantic structures

AI systems can now encode and render synthetic likenesses, decoupling visual identity from its bearer. This paper argues that without a coherent philosophical account of what constitutes a "proper" likeness, policy responses to deepfakes and generative imagery will conflate distinct problems. Provides the theoretical groundwork for the harms taxonomy developed in the companion paper with Bariach and McBride.

Also in: semantic structures

Qualitative analysis of 34 British adults' sexting experiences reveals how platform affordances shape intimate digital communication as "emotion work" governed by feeling rules around trust, desire, and shame. The technical mediation of intimate exchange creates new norms and vulnerabilities that don't exist in unmediated contexts.

Investigates the mechanisms linking camera-on Zoom use to mental exhaustion, finding that self-monitoring and social interaction anxiety mediate the relationship. Unlike telephone or text, the platform's architecture of mandatory mutual visibility imposes a specific cognitive and emotional burden that is unevenly distributed across personality types.

Also in: networks as epistemology

Argues that networks are not merely analytical tools but systematizing devices with power in their own right. Facebook, X, and LinkedIn are all networks of data representing people, and the critical question is not only "what can networks tell us?" but also "do the networks constrain us?"

Also in: networks as epistemology

Twenty-five years after "the digital divide" was first identified, foundational access inequalities persist across class, gender, race, disability, and geography. Introduces the "digital inequality stack". This includes connectivity infrastructure through devices, skills, and production capacity, thereby showing how platform architectures layer new forms of exclusion atop legacy disparities.

Companion to the 2.0 paper, focusing on novel inequalities spawned by the platform economy: algorithmic bias, automation-driven precarity, big data asymmetries, cybersafety gaps, and differential emotional well-being. These emergent inequalities are not merely extensions of old divides but structurally new forms of disadvantage created by platform architectures themselves.

Uses machine learning classifiers and platform metadata to distinguish between r/MensRights and r/MensLib on Reddit, showing how platform signals (voting patterns, cross-posting, moderation) shape the meaning of superficially similar discourse. The same words arrive at different politics through different platform-mediated contexts.

Also in: semantic structures

Platforms encode relationships as static links that persist after lived relationships end, where "it's complicated" is Facebook's closest approximation to the chaos of a breakup. The gap between performed love and exhibited relationship status reveals how platform ontologies flatten the complexity of intimate life into machine-readable categories that serve the platform's logic, not the users'.

Also in: semantic structures

In the wake of Cambridge Analytica, Facebook framed its API restrictions as a privacy measure. But this narrative obscures a simpler truth: closing third-party access while maintaining proprietary data monopoly is a power consolidation move dressed up as user protection.

LGBTQ youth must navigate Facebook's architecture of enforced singular identity when their social reality requires selective disclosure to different audiences. The platform's collapsed context, presenting one profile to family, school, and queer community simultaneously, forces identity management strategies that range from uniformly "out" to carefully segmented, revealing how real-name platforms become sites of involuntary disclosure.

Also in: networks as epistemology

Facebook's progressive API restrictions eliminated researchers' and users' capacity to access their own social graph data. This wasn't a privacy feature but rather a monopolization of the means of representation. Introduces "relational generativity" to describe platforms' systematic capture of users' network data.

Also in: networks as epistemology, semantic structures

Examines how platform affordances create new vectors for relationship boundary violation, as online boundary crossing is linked to lower relationship satisfaction and partner responsiveness. The technological mediation of intimate relationships doesn't merely digitize existing dynamics; it introduces structurally new forms of intrusion enabled by always-on platform connectivity.

Applies Weber's theory of stratification to the digital divide in Serbian higher education, finding that platform literacy, not mere access, determines who benefits from digital tools. The gap between students and instructors in digital skills creates hierarchies of competence that mirror and reinforce existing institutional power structures.

Also in: teaching and translation

Facebook's algorithmic filtering actively hides friends' views most likely to provoke disagreement, yielding "a doctored account of their personalities." This isn't a side effect but a design choice. The platform could use its knowledge of users to bridge divides, but instead optimizes for engagement by minimizing friction and systematically fragmenting shared reality.

The College Connect application used Facebook's social graph to visualize prospective college students' networks, with social media information access being significant only for first-generation students, those with the least institutional knowledge. Platform data, when made legible to users rather than hoarded by the platform, can redistribute informational advantage.

Also in: networks as epistemology

Examines low participation in and limited content within Arabic Wikipedia as a case study in how platform architecture interacts with linguistic, political, and infrastructural barriers to produce systematic knowledge gaps. The collective construction of knowledge is only as democratic as the conditions of participation allow.

Examines how pre-existing friendship ties structure conversation within Facebook groups, finding that network position shapes who speaks and who is heard. Platform-mediated group dynamics don't simply mirror offline social structures but instead create new patterns of conversational agency where structural position in the friendship network amplifies or dampens voice.

Also in: networks as epistemology

Critiques the shift from transparent ordering (alphabetical, chronological) to opaque machine learning-driven curation of online information. Argues that invisible algorithmic sorting represents an ideological choice rather than a neutral optimization, and explores alternative interactive affordances that could return agency to users through graph-based data presentation.

Also in: semantic structures

Uses the social life of vinyl records as an analogy to reconceptualize social media as many-to-many affordances rather than a unified technology suite. This reframing highlights how platform design choices about mixing, specifically what content surfaces alongside what other content, shape users' informational environments in ways that are invisible but consequential.

Defines and contextualizes social media platforms as technical systems with specific affordances for many-to-many communication, distinguishing them from earlier digital communication tools. Establishes a conceptual vocabulary for understanding how these platforms mediate social interaction at scale.

Also in: teaching and translation

Maps Wikipedia participation to reveal "informational magnetism," the tendency for knowledge production to cluster around existing economic cores, creating virtuous cycles for the center and vicious cycles for the periphery. The relative democratization of internet access has not produced a concurrent democratization of voice and representation on platforms.

Also in: networks as epistemology

Social networking sites encourage users to construct "relational self-portraits," which are dynamic, selective digital selves that exist only through connections to others. The platform's architecture determines what aspects of identity become visible and to whom, making self-representation inseparable from the technical infrastructure that mediates it.

Also in: networks as epistemology

Demonstrates that internet connectivity alone cannot remedy global informational inequality, as some regions remain systematically underrepresented in user-generated content despite adequate infrastructure. Wikipedia's geographic coverage reveals how platform architecture and existing power structures reproduce and amplify real-world inequalities in knowledge production.

Also in: networks as epistemology

Maps persistent information asymmetries between the MENA region and the developed world on Wikipedia, finding that "openness" of a platform does not guarantee equitable participation. Structural barriers, whether linguistic, political, or infrastructural, mean that nominally open platforms reproduce existing geopolitical hierarchies of knowledge production.

Argues that platforms must be understood as actors in network analysis, not merely as neutral infrastructure through which social action flows. Their algorithms, APIs, and personalization features actively shape the networks they host, making the platform itself a node of power rather than a passive medium.

Also in: networks as epistemology

The shift from pseudonymous to real-name platforms represents a specific political turn, not a natural evolution of the web. Real-name policies like Google+'s and Facebook's solve a problem for platform owners, namely unified data profiles, while eliminating users' capacity to manage collapsed contexts and effectively forcing a single global identity where multiple local ones previously served.

Also in: semantic structures

Presents an interactive visualization tool mapping every geolocated Wikipedia article worldwide, making visible the stark asymmetries in geographic representation. The tool itself demonstrates that platform data, when made accessible through alternative interfaces, can reveal structural inequalities that the platform's own interface obscures.

Also in: methods and tools

Provides an overview of Facebook's technical architecture and its implications for social network analysis, at a moment when the platform was still relatively open to researchers. Documents the affordances and constraints of the platform in its pre-API-closure era, a baseline against which subsequent data monopolization can be measured.

Also in: teaching and translation

Cross-national survey of 17 countries reveals online dating as complement rather than substitute for offline meeting, with adoption highest among those over 40 re-entering the dating market. Platforms mediate who meets whom at scale, reconfiguring the opportunity structures for intimate relationship formation in ways that vary by age, gender, and cultural context.

Also in: networks as epistemology

An audit study of Toronto Craigslist rental listings showing that "opportunity-denying" discrimination, where landlords simply do not respond to racialized names, was ten times more common than overt hostility. The platform's architecture, by enabling anonymous screening of applicants through email, creates new infrastructures for discrimination that operate through non-response rather than explicit exclusion.

Also in: methods and tools

Identifies persistent social practices and long-term trajectories that underlie the seeming chaos of everyday social media use. Despite platform-specific affordances, enduring patterns of interaction reveal how technical infrastructure constrains and channels social behavior across platforms, users, and cultures.

Extends Goffman's dramaturgical framework to identify a new form of power in social media: the platform as curator. Unlike synchronous performances before co-present audiences, social media creates asynchronous "exhibitions" where algorithms decide what surfaces, when, and to whom.

Also in: networks as epistemology