Governance, Competition, & Extremism: How the Structure of Social Media Platforms Radicalizes Communities

Abstract

In this project, I argue that social media platform governance drives variation in online political extremism at the community level. My argument makes two claims: first, social media platforms are a kind of private governance, a new iteration of non-Weberian political authority specializing in control over information and access to public goods like attention and engagement. Whereas much of the work on platform governance has focused on interaction with existing state (primarily Western) legal systems or new transformations of human-centered design and social organization, the political institutions and processes of digital platforms are best understood within the framework of competitive state-building. This approach re-frames platforms as the result of progressive consolidation around and monopolization of information and attention. This, I argue, is the source of authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty for social media platforms. Technically, platforms have absolute sovereignty over information: control over code means control over bits. However, their claims to authority and legitimacy vary widely based on the political institutions and practices through which they exercise sovereignty. It is this political environment--and the authority and legitimacy that it generates--that can determine the network structure and level of extremism in online political communities. Second, I argue that the mechanism that connects platform political regimes and extremism in online spaces is community competition for public goods. When platforms govern through the algorithmic imposition of small, angry micro-identities and pit them against each other in a contest for information, attention, and engagement, political communities tend towards extremist ideological commitments and behaviors.