Social Media Platforms and the Curation of Public Culture

Media sociologists have long studied the role that private, commercial media providers play in shaping public culture. It has long been apparent that broadcasters and publishers make choices and assumptions that have consequences for the information we encounter, take seriously, or overlook.

However, these questions are only beginning to be asked about the networked information environment and the comparable role played by social media. Social networking sites, search engines, and user content platforms are now the private intermediaries of online public discourse. Consideration about their impact too often focuses on specific missteps: privacy breaches, clumsy attempts to monetize users, and violations of ethics and implicit contract. But more fundamental questions about their role in shaping public culture must also be raised.

In this talk, I will map my research efforts in this area, primarily along two lines. First, I’ve looked at what these platforms select out: these seemingly open platforms regularly police content and suspend users for an array of violations. I examine how platforms establish and enforce their “community guidelines,” where specific lines get drawn and with what consequences, and how the forms of oversight they have instituted are settling in as mundane and appropriate interventions into digital public culture. I pay particular attention to where these interventions are contested, as they illuminate key tensions around the public role of platforms. Second, I’ve looked at what they select for: these seemingly flat platforms are full of mechanisms deigned to offer up some content over others. Search and recommendation algorithms, financially motivated promotions of content, and “trending” measures of popularity attempt to highlight the right content for us, quietly setting so much else aside. These assumptions of relevance and interest are themselves sociological mechanisms, built into the code, that instantiate specific assumptions about public discourse and its value.

Together, these two lines of inquiry raise questions about the responsibilities we might expect from, or impose on, social media platforms, at the level of site governance and at a broader policy domain. And they raise sociological questions about how these social media platforms, through their socio-technical design and governance apparatus, are shaping contemporary public culture.