Helmond, Anne
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Publication Access status: Open Access , From healthy communities to toxic debates: Disqus’ changing ideas about comment moderation(2022); ; This article examines how the commenting platform Disqus changed the way it speaks about commenting and moderation over time. To examine this evolving self-presentation, the Internet Archive Wayback Machine was used to analyse the company’s website and blog between 2007 and 2021. By combining interpretative close-reading approaches with computerised distant-reading procedures, it examined how Disqus tried to advance online discussion and dealt with moderation over time. It was found that in the mid-2000s, commenting systems were supposed to help filter and surface valuable contributions to public discourse, while ten years later their focus had shifted to the proclaimed goal of protecting public discourse from contamination with potentially harmful (“toxic”) communication. To achieve this, the company developed new tools and features to facilitate and semiautomate this active and interventive form of moderation. This rise of platform interventionism was fostered by a turn towards semantics of urgency in the company’s language to legitimise its actions.Source Type:BookSeries:Transformationen des Populären. Working Paper Series des SFB 1472Volume number:33 21 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Publication Access status: Open Access , The technicity of platform governance: structure and evolution of Facebook’s APIsResearchers, policymakers, and competition and regulation authorities worldwide recognise application pro- gramming interfaces (APIs) for powering the digital economy and driving processes of datafication and platformisation. However, it is unclear how APIs tie into the power of, and gov- ernance by, large digital platforms. This article traces the rela- tionality between Facebook’s APIs, platform governance, and data strategy based on an empirical and evolutionary analy- sis. It examines a large corpus of (archived) developer pages and API reference documentation to determine the technicity of platform governance – the technical dimension and dynam- ics of how and what platforms like Facebook seek to govern. It traces how Facebook Platform evolved into a complex layered and interconnected governance arrangement, wherein techni- cal API specifications serve to enforce (changes to) platform policy and (data) strategy. Finally, the article discusses the significance of this technicity in specifying the material condi- tions for app and business development ‘on top of’ platforms and for maintaining infrastructural and evolutive power over their ecosystems.Source Type:BookSeries:Working paper series / SFB 1187 Medien der KooperationVolume number:203 52
