Beyond the Big Tech: Contentious Speech on Small Platforms

Introduction

In 2022, following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, users of the microblogging platform who feared a rise in far-right discourses with the new owner’s idiosyncratic free speech policies announced their migration to Mastodon—a free, federated social networking service.

Context of Migration

In 2021, in India, following Twitter’s actions against hateful speech, religious majoritarian actors rushed to secure their spot on Koo, a new homegrown platform.

In the UK, Britain First, a far-right movement known for its anti-immigration rhetoric, migrated to Gab (microblogging) and Telegram (messaging) after facing bans on Twitter and Facebook.

Such emerging trends signal the growing importance of smaller social media platforms.

Project Overview

Drawing the focus on such platforms, this project sets up small platform discourse as an object of anthropological inquiry. Grounded in anthropology and backed with policy analysis, algorithm auditing, computational natural language processing (NLP), and social network analysis (SNA), SMALLPLATFORMS will be the first study to explore small platforms in a cross-cultural framework spanning on-ground and online inquiries, and the global North (Germany, UK) and the South (Kenya, India).

Conceptual Framework

Using a unique conceptual model that considers the restrictive and generative sides of small platform discourse as a dialectical relation, the project explicates three structural tensions among global capital, technopolitics, and speech regulation that underlie this relation.

The project asks whether and in what ways forms of contentious speech are bound up with practices surrounding small platforms.

Research Implications

Through this empirical excavation with policy implications, the project will theorize digital discourse beyond the conceptual language of the centralizing Big Tech.

With extensive theoretical and comparative work on online speech, the PI will drive this research using networks and knowledge about the selected sites and the profound global dimensions of digital media.