Platform transience: changes in Facebook’s policies, procedures, and affordances in global electoral politics

Barrett, Bridget; Kreiss, Daniel

doi:10.14763/2019.4.1446

Cited by 30 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Studying algorithmic systems poses many practical and epistemological challenges (Kitchin, 2017). Algorithms are typically kept secret (Pasquale, 2015), can be extraordinarily complex (Burrell, 2016) and are constantly evolving (Kitchin, 2017), particularly as platform affordances continually change (Barrett and Kreiss, 2019). Heeding Kitchin's advice on studying algorithms in light of these challenges, in this study, we focus on the ways that algorithms "do work in and make the world" (2017: 18).…”

Section: Methods and Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Reach the right people”: The politics of “interests” in Facebook’s classification system for ad targeting

et al. 2021

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Political campaigns increasingly rely on Facebook for reaching their constituents, particularly through ad targeting. Facebook’s business model is premised on a promise to connect advertisers with the “right” users: those likely to click, download, engage, purchase. The company pursues this promise (in part) by algorithmically inferring users’ interests from their data and providing advertisers with a means of targeting users by their inferred interests. In this study, we explore for whom this interest classification system works in order to build on conversations in critical data studies about the ways such systems produce knowledge about the world rooted in power structures. We critically analyze the classification system from a variety of empirical vantage points—via user data; Facebook documentation, training, and patents; and Facebook’s tools for advertisers—and through theoretical concepts from a variety of domains. In this, we focus on the ways the classification system shapes possibilities for political representation and voice, particularly for people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people. We argue that this “big data-driven” classification system should be read as political: it articulates a stance not only on what issues are or are not important in the U.S. public sphere, but also on who is considered a significant enough public to be adequately accounted for.

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Section: Methods and Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Reach the right people”: The politics of “interests” in Facebook’s classification system for ad targeting

et al. 2021

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“…Questions like these could also be asked regarding issues relating to technical design, content moderation, or the interaction with institutions of legal enforcement. Researchers are beginning to look into these processes, but we are far from understanding them (Barrett & Kreiss, 2019;Douek, 2019;Gillespie, 2018;Kaye, 2019;Keller, 2018;Suzor, 2019). This is not simply a matter of platforms but also of how they interface with other institutions.…”

Section: Legitimacy Of Refereesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disinformation and the Structural Transformations of the Public Arena: Addressing the Actual Challenges to Democracy

Jungherr

Schroeder

2021

Social Media + Society

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Current debate is dominated by fears of the threats of digital technology for democracy. One typical example is the perceived threats of malicious actors promoting disinformation through digital channels to sow confusion and exacerbate political divisions. The prominence of the threat of digital disinformation in the public imagination, however, is not supported by empirical findings which instead indicate that disinformation is a limited problem with limited reach among the public. Its prominence in public discourse is instead best understood as a “moral panic.” In this article, we argue that we should shift attention from these evocative but empirically marginal phenomena of deviance connected with digital media toward the structural transformations that give rise to these fears, namely those that have impacted information flows and attention allocation in the public arena. This account centers on structural transformations of the public arena and associated new challenges, especially in relation to gatekeepers, old and new. How the public arena serves actually existing democracy will not be addressed by focusing on disinformation, but rather by addressing structural transformations and the new challenges that arise from these.

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“…With our historical case study, we contribute to the emerging scholarship on the evolution of digital platforms, APIs, and governance (e.g. Barrett and Kreiss, 2019;.…”

Section: Api Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Understanding how the platform and its APIs evolve and how a leading platform such as Facebook responds to issues and concerns requires looking closely and empirically at the evolution of access points, data structures, and graph data structures (cf. Barrett and Kreiss, 2019;. Therefore, this paper contributes an in-depth technical and empirical perspective on the evolution of Facebook's Graph API in its entirety from its introduction as the Facebook API (beta) in 2006 onwards, and how it evolved into one of the most significant web APIs and an integral part of contemporary advertising infrastructures and web development cultures.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Evolution of Facebook's Graph Api

Burkhardt

Helmond

Seitz

et al. 2020

SPIR

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Facebook’s application programming interfaces (APIs) enable third-party app developers to access data and functionality and have become central to many of the platform’s ongoing data scandals and privacy concerns. Understanding how the platform and its APIs evolve and how it responds to issues requires looking closely and empirically at the evolution of access points, data structures, and graph data structures. The technicity of APIs is crucial for understanding the politics of data sharing and how APIs represent and structure phenomena and temporarily stabilise them. Instead of using APIs as an umbrella term for data retrieval, we conduct historical “technical fieldwork” for examining the evolving architecture and interfaces of Facebook’s web APIs. We contribute an in-depth technical and empirical perspective on the evolution of Facebook’s Graph API since 2006, and how it evolved into one of the most significant web APIs and an integral part of contemporary advertising infrastructures and web development cultures. Our empirical historical analysis of Facebook’s Graph API is based on the entire corpus of available archived developer documentation held by the Internet Archive. As we show, key changes in the Graph API evolution are characterized by phases of experimentation, standardization, commercialization, and regulation. We provide a “scalable reading” of the evolution of Facebook’s Graph API which provides insights in how data and data flows are governed through changes in data structures and permissions. By considering the evolving structures of APIs and individual data objects, we may develop further empirically informed critiques of platforms, APIs, and their data.

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Platform transience: changes in Facebook’s policies, procedures, and affordances in global electoral politics

Cited by 30 publications

References 12 publications

“Reach the right people”: The politics of “interests” in Facebook’s classification system for ad targeting

“Reach the right people”: The politics of “interests” in Facebook’s classification system for ad targeting

Disinformation and the Structural Transformations of the Public Arena: Addressing the Actual Challenges to Democracy

The Evolution of Facebook's Graph Api

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