Three Phases in Social Media Platforms’ Legitimising Rhetoric for Their Role in Politics

The second speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is the excellent Sally-Maaria Laaksonen, whose interest is in the intersection between platforms and politics. There have now been several years of critical discussion around this troubled intersection, and a growing legitimacy crisis four such platforms. Much of this is related to electoral politics, especially as platforms are now widely used to talk about election – and to intervene in electoral politics in legitimate and illegitimate ways.

Platforms themselves are not neutral in this: the privilege and promote certain styles of communication, and political communication has thereby been platformed; meanwhile, political advertising is also big business for platforms, of course (although there have also been moments where they have temporarily restricted political advertising).

What is the discursive legitimation of such platforms, then? How are such actors legitimised in these discourses, and/or how are they building their own legitimation? How are they explaining, in short, why and how they are engaging in these processes? This project focusses on ten major platform companies and scraped their corporate blogs over the past 20 years, filtering these 29,000 posts for election-related posts and exploring the major themes in this corpus.

At first, elections and politics were a minor topic in these blog posts; this changed substantially from 2016 onwards. Early on, most of the focus was on YouTube, while in later years the key focus was on Twitter and Meta. This separates into three main phases: a first, roughly until 2014, emphasised the use of social media in politics as a triumph of democracy – promoting political livestreams, highlighting YouTube creators and showcasing campaign videos. Legitimation was mainly moral and emphasised the role of ordinary, everyday users as participants in democratic processes.

The second phase responds to the Cambridge Analytica moment and adopts a more defensive discursive strategy: here, transparency reports, advertising controls, fact-checking initiatives, traditional media collaborations, and other efforts are highlighted, and mis- and disinformation and other problems are highlighted as issues that the platforms are tackling actively through a variety of means. This highlights, for instance, the number of content take-downs and account suspensions, and introduces a newspeak on election integrity that uses terms like ‘transparency’, ‘misinformation’, and ‘fake news’. It also ringfences such issues by singling out specific bad actors (‘malicious misinformation’, ‘harmful fake news’, ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’) that are an aberration rather than the norm.

The third phase can be described as an era of platform agency, where platforms justify and underline the more proactive role of platforms and emphasise their bans on political advertising, introduction of advertising libraries, content curation efforts that focus on quality sources, etc. This naturalises certain approaches and points to (internal) research that legitimises such interventions. It offers a theoretical rationalisation that seeks to position platforms as central actors for democracy.

These shifts also show the power of scandal – especially the Cambridge Analytica moment, which leads to such a substantial rhetorical repositioning. In the process, the old social media speech is backgrounded, but comes back again in the final phase as platforms seek to legitimise their role as societal actors.