The Politics of Social Media

Abstract

This chapter explores a fundamental tension of social media by considering their socially reproductive and (potentially) transformative function. The claim is that while media and communication technologies have historically fueled both aspiration and fear of social change, their ability to shape societies are contingent on the specific social relations in which they operate. By investigating social media's economic practices, primarily platform capitalism, the reproductive relations that support user-generated content that influence platform's capabilities to reproduce and transform existing social contexts are examined. To illustrate this, political discourse via social media platforms have been used to argue that social media's current capitalist mode of production exemplifies an antagonism between exploitative/emancipatory tendencies and reproductive/transformative aspects, which are further articulated by a liberal ideology.