Public Platforms: Beyond the Cycle of Shock and Exception

• In Event: Paradoxes of Participation: Open Platforms, Closed Knowledge?

Abstract

Social media platforms increasingly resemble infrastructures (Plantin et al, 2016): embedded, largely invisible, often taken-for-granted, highly standardized information systems (Star & Ruhleder, 1996) with enormous user bases and ubiquitous reach (Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013; Thorson & Wells, 2016; Clark et al, 2014). They are heavily relied upon during crises, their breakdowns are quickly noticed (Ananny, 2015), and they help to shape large-scale conversations and social formations (Gillespie, 2010).

Yet these platforms often aim to escape the kind of regulation that usually accompanies public infrastructures. They invoke free market principles to deflect regulatory oversight, and lean on long-standing legal protections to avoid liability for what users do with them (Gillespie forthcoming; Mackinnon et al, 2014; Mueller 2015); and they regularly explain away their mistakes as the result of unavoidably risky “permanently beta” innovation cultures (Neff & Stark, 2004).

These defensive maneuvers come into stark relief during what we define as “public shocks”: incidents, be they exogenous or endogenous to the platform, that interrupt ostensibly private services, suddenly and visibly highlighting their infrastructural qualities and calling them to account for their public implications. These shocks sometimes spur a cycle of public indignation and regulatory pushback that can produce critical—but often unsatisfying and insufficient—responses, ameliorations, or exceptions on the part of the platform.

In this paper we present a typology of such shocks and describe the cycle that sometimes follows from them. We see shocks as insufficient as political interventions in their own right, but as useful diagnostics: shocks reveal the edges of public comfort with market-driven priorities, the timescales over which outrages develop, and the emerging repertoire of platform responses. We examine one such incident in detail—Uber’s surge pricing algorithm during emergencies—and trace the cycle of shock and exception that followed. We end by reflecting upon what a more proactive and sustained platform governance would require, and look to other domains of regulation for lessons in the public governance of private actors.

Authors

• Mike Ananny, U of Southern California

• Tarleton L. Gillespie, Microsoft Research