Internal Fractures: The Competing Logics of Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms are too often understood as monoliths with clear priorities. Instead, we analyze them as complex organizations torn between starkly different justifications of their missions. Focusing on the case of Meta, we inductively analyze the company’s public materials and identify thre...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social media + society 2024-08, Vol.10 (3)
Main Authors: Christin, Angèle, Bernstein, Michael S., Hancock, Jeffrey T., Jia, Chenyan, Mado, Marijn N., Tsai, Jeanne L., Xu, Chunchen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Complex organizations
Decision making
Mass media
Social media
Well being
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Social media platforms are too often understood as monoliths with clear priorities. Instead, we analyze them as complex organizations torn between starkly different justifications of their missions. Focusing on the case of Meta, we inductively analyze the company’s public materials and identify three evaluative logics that shape the platform’s decisions: an engagement logic, a public debate logic, and a wellbeing logic. There are clear trade-offs between these logics, which often result in internal conflicts between teams and departments in charge of these different priorities. We examine recent examples showing how Meta rotates between logics in its decision-making, though the goal of engagement dominates in internal negotiations. We outline how this framework can be applied to other social media platforms such as TikTok, Reddit, and X. We discuss the ramifications of our findings for the study of online harms, exclusion, and extraction.
ISSN:2056-3051
2056-3051
DOI:10.1177/20563051241274668