(Research Summary by Felicity Gancedo)
Jacob Smith, CITAP GRA, along with co-authors Aaron Shapiro, Courtlyn Pippert, and Zari Taylor, explore the intricate dynamics of power and reciprocity between digital platforms and their users through the lens of "asymmetrical reciprocity," in “Patrons of commerce: Asymmetrical reciprocity and moral economics of platform power”. The authors posit that platforms often position themselves as benevolent patrons, creating a perceived imbalance where they appear to give more than they take. This perception helps platforms legitimize their authority and control, but it is a fragile legitimacy that users frequently challenge. The authors argue that platforms utilize this patronage to mask the true nature of their interactions with users, where they often extract more value than they contribute.
Case Study #1: Twitch
Changes in subscription revenue policies sparked significant backlash on Twitch; the platform's decision to alter the split of subscription revenues from a favorable 70/30% to a less generous 50/50% for top earners was met with outcry from content creators. These creators felt that Twitch, by rolling back previously negotiated terms, had violated a tacit agreement of mutual benefit and support. This vignette illustrates the precarious balance platforms must maintain between their profitability and their public image as supportive of their user communities.
Case Study #2: Amazon Kindle
Authors utilizing Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing faced challenges with scammers manipulating the platform's payment algorithms. The platform's initial reluctance to address the scamming issues effectively showed a discrepancy between the support Amazon claimed to offer to authors and the reality of their policies. This situation highlighted the tension between Amazon's role as a market leader in digital publishing and its responsibilities toward the creators who populate its platform with content.
Case Study #3: Deplatforming adult content creators and sex workers
Sex workers and adult content creators, who often face harsher content moderation compared to other users, are directly impacted by shadowbans and account suspensions on platforms. This segment of platform users regularly contends with arbitrary enforcement of policies, which disproportionately affects their ability to earn a livelihood. The response from the platforms often lacks transparency and fails to address the specific needs and challenges faced by these creators, revealing a significant imbalance in how platforms manage relationships with different user groups.
The authors argue that to rectify the asymmetries in power and reciprocity, platforms need to invest in what the authors term "legitimacy costs." Platforms can better align their operations with the interests of their diverse user communities, thereby stabilizing their legitimacy and fostering a more equitable digital ecosystem.
(Research Summary by Katherine Furl)
Fewer than one in five English-language Wikipedia biographies on academics, inventors, and writers are about women. Wikipedia’s biographical gender gap persists partly because biographies written for women are disproportionately deleted. The process leading biographies to be considered for deletion in the first place, however, has received little attention. In “Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia,” CITAP Principal Investigator Francesca Tripodi observes Wikipedia edit-a-thons, interviews Wikipedia editors, and analyzes data from over 20,000 Wikipedia biographies nominated as “Articles for Deletion” (AfD) to understand how inequalities in whose biographies are flagged as potentially non-notable itself entrenches gender inequality—and perpetuates a culture where women’s accomplishments are systematically devalued and rendered invisible.
Women’s underrepresentation on Wikipedia extends beyond featured biographies: women are far less likely to edit Wikipedia as well. Estimates suggest that much like the gender gap in biographies, only about one in five Wikipedia editors are women. The overrepresentation of men among Wikipedia’s editors can lead to gender biases extending throughout Wikipedia’s editorial practices. As Dr. Tripodi notes, “Despite the presumption of consensus among Wikipedians, ‘neutral’ roles and formalities on the site embody subjectivity and bias in their application and effect.”
Observing “edit-a-thons" aimed at adding women’s biographies to Wikipedia, Dr. Tripodi found that even as edit-a-thons were ongoing, biographies were being flagged as not notable enough for inclusion on Wikipedia. To keep women's biographies from being deleted, editors must volunteer additional time to diligently debunk bad-faith nominations for removal. When editors voice their concerns about gender discrimination in these instances, they are often dismissed as taking deletion nominations too personally and as being too sensitive. These obstacles, Dr. Tripodi argues, constitute an additional burden of emotional labor—the often women editors invested in bridging Wikipedia’s biographical gender gap must be hypervigilant and hide their disappointment lest they be considered oversensitive and irrational.
Gender inequalities in Wikipedia biography deletion nominations show similarly discriminatory patterns. Comparing the percentage of biographies written for women and men nominated for deletion, Dr. Tripodi found that not only were women’s biographies more likely to be nominated for removal, but that in several years, around one in four biographies on women were nominated for deletion—a higher percentage than the proportion of Wikipedia biographies written about women overall.
Unequally nominating Wikipedia biographies for deletion based on gender re-entrenches gender inequality even when editors successfully defend women’s biographies and keep them on the site. The additional emotional labor needed to combat bad-faith nominations can have a chilling effect on women Wikipedia editors. Gender inequality in Wikipedia’s biographical representation and editorship are two sides of the same coin—and to address both, we must look beyond Wikipedia to a culture that regularly delegitimizes and erases women’s contributions.
(research summary by Katherine Furl)
What do researchers lose by failing to consider power when studying digital networks and right-wing publics? In “Recentering power: conceptualizing counterpublics and defensive publics,” Sarah J. Jackson and Daniel Kreiss argue that without considering the ways many right-wing publics defend longstanding systems of inequality, we fail to understand the impact these right-wing publics have on democracy at large—and we minimize the vital work of counterpublics that truly challenge unequal systems.
Jackson and Kreiss trace how communications scholars use the concept of “counterpublics” to see how its meaning has become muddled over time. In contrast to an imagined singular public sphere with shared ideals, counterpublics emerge to address social, economic, and political inequalities and hold values shaped by these unequal systems of power. Counterpublics vary widely, but whether they tackle systemic racism, sexism, heteronormativity, colonialism and imperialism, or other inequalities, they all serve to challenge dominant values aligned with and upheld by groups in power.
But as studies of digital networks focus on larger datasets and ever-more sophisticated computational methods, Jackson and Kreiss find that many new studies apply the term to any publics seen as “alternative” and deviating from the mainstream, even when they promote values aligned with prevailing systems of power (as is the case for right-wing groups advocating white supremacy through overt racism, for example.) As they put it: “what some scholars take to be right-wing ‘counterpublics’ are often instead a backlash in the defense of established social, racial, and political orders.”
Failing to recognize important differences between counterpublics that challenge systems of power and right-wing publics that defend those systems because both use “alternative” means runs run the risk of “legitimizing anti-democratic movements at best, or furthering them at worst.”
In response, they recommend three practices that apply to many studies of social movements:
- In studying publics, counterpublics, and defensive publics, remember their historical, national, and international contexts; we can’t understand relationships between these groups without also understanding how they emerged.
- Consider differences within and between groups and be mindful of who is left out of which conversations and how different groups must strategize to have their voices heard.
- Be mindful of how institutions, resources, and unequal access amplify or silence counterpublics challenging dominant systems and the inequalities they uphold.
These analyses keeping power at the center of research and ensures that we better understand the important distinction between counterpublics challenging the status quo, defensive publics upholding longstanding systems of inequality, and the impact of both on democracy as a whole.