Since October 2019, I have been conducting a comparative study, looking into the construction of platform values across the infrastructures of five social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. A central premise that guides my dissertation is that the construction of values by social media platforms assumes different forms, ranging from explicit exclamations such as corporate identity statements to implicit and even invisible design choices. Following this logic, the three papers comprising my Ph.D. focus on different sites of value construction: policies, platform design, and platforms’ social initiatives. The first two articles of my Ph.D. are published in New Media & Society and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. In this talk, I will focus on a project that centers on the public moderation of platform values through social media platform PR initiatives such as TikTok for Good. Building on previous work, I propose the concept of depoliticization by platforms, which I define as the allocation of power from the institutional (platforms) to the personal (individual). Complementing existing research, this strategy is then used to moderate the image of a platform through the promotion or avoidance of particular values, which I demonstrate through the case study of TikTok for Good. In the discussion, I will focus on future directions for research on platform values and the challenges that Internet researchers face with the current developments in the social media landscape.

Bio: Rebecca Scharlach is an international PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a core member of the ERC-funded research project DigitalValues. Her dissertation, supervised by Limor Shifman, focuses on the construction of values by social media platforms. Broadly, her research critically examines the intersection between platform governance and society.