Foundational coordinates
Two texts anchor this collection as touchstones rather than retrospectives themselves. Gillespie2010-as established that “platform” is never a neutral descriptor but a piece of strategic discourse—one that lets intermediaries claim openness and populism while eliding their curatorial and commercial interventions. van-Dijck2018-up scaled that insight into a full theory of the “platform society,” arguing that platforms do not merely mediate social life but constitute it, embedding US-centric values in infrastructures that increasingly substitute for public institutions. Read together, they supply the vocabulary—platform as ideology, platform as infrastructure, platform as contested site of public value—that the 2025–2026 anniversary essays either extend, stress-test, or declare exhausted.
The unraveling of “social”
A cluster of essays converges on a single diagnosis: the word “social” in social media no longer describes what these platforms do. Boyd2026-op proposes retiring the term altogether in favor of “parasocial media,” arguing that scrolling has displaced posting and algorithmically boosted influencer content has displaced peer reciprocity. Gerbaudo2026-fo offers a more structural account of the same shift, theorizing TikTok’s move from “networked publics” (built on explicit, visible interpersonal ties) to “clustered publics” (statistically inferred, opaque, item-centric groupings)—a morphological transformation now spreading across platforms via “TikTokification.” Tornberg2026-lc pushes this furthest, arguing the entire “social media” paradigm is dissolving into three post-social formations: algorithmic broadcasting, semi-private micro-communities, and AI-mediated communication, with Meta’s own data (7% of Instagram time spent on followed content) as the smoking gun. Marwick2026-ss supplies the affective and historical counterpoint from the inside, using her own LiveJournal years to show what has been lost—reciprocity, vulnerability, granular intimacy—and insisting the current extractive, alienating configuration was a political-economic choice, not an inevitability. Across these four pieces, a consistent arc emerges: from people-centered networks, to interest-based algorithmic sorting, to a fragmented ecology in which “sociality” survives mainly in private back-channels or as one-directional parasocial attachment.
Platformization’s second act: extraction, scam, and stalled critique
If the first generation of platform critique (Gillespie, van Dijck) focused on infrastructural capture and the platform/public-value tension, this cohort documents what platformization looks like a decade on. Helmond2026-ll revisits her own coinage of “platformization” and argues the concept itself has eroded through overuse, proposing to redefine it as a situated “transcoding” process—newly visible in Meta’s retirement of the Like button (marking the end of social-graph logic) and in Big Tech’s expansion into AI infrastructure, energy, and even orbital compute (Project Suncatcher). Swartz2026-zb radicalizes the political-economy critique by arguing that scams are not peripheral to platform capitalism but constitutive of it: anti-fraud infrastructures double as surveillance and data-extraction apparatuses, and the “network scam” has become a dominant mode of digital economic life. Baym2026-tr closes the loop by returning to her own 2015 manifesto and finding every one of its four warnings—inequality, algorithmic opacity, labor precarity, data extraction—not merely persistent but intensified, crystallized in the “broligarchy’s” trillion-dollar fortunes and generative AI’s appropriation of user-generated content. Together these essays trace a shift in the terms of critique itself: from asking whether platforms serve public values to documenting how thoroughly extractive and scam-adjacent logics have become naturalized within them, and from optimistic reform proposals to Baym’s blunt call to move past critique-for-its-own-sake toward actual collaborative intervention.
Managing the narrative: discourse, governance, and inequality
Two papers examine the discursive and administrative machinery platforms use to manage their own transformation and its unevenness. De2026-ld coins “changecraft” to describe how Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and X narrate constant change—making infrastructural shifts performatively visible while reframing ideological pivots (e.g., abandoning fact-checking) as mere continuity, all via tropes of creator benevolence and democratization that mask consolidation. Tonneau2025-bv grounds this in hard governance data, using DSA transparency disclosures to show that content-moderation labor is starkly skewed toward English and away from Global South languages, leaving millions of EU users effectively unmoderated—empirical confirmation that platform rhetoric of universal service coexists with deeply unequal infrastructural investment.
Platform ecology under stress: migration, coordination, polarization
A related set of studies tests whether the platform ecosystem can actually reorganize itself in response to crisis. Bruns2026-yv narrates Twitter’s full arc from prosocial, flat-network public sphere to “enshittified” fringe platform under Musk, and finds that successor platforms (Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky) clone Twitter’s form without solving its governance failures. Wang2026-ub provides a granular empirical companion, tracking academic Twitter’s attempted exodus to Mastodon and showing that even a highly motivated, well-networked migrant cohort mostly failed to sustain the move—decentralization’s promise founders on discoverability and social-capital portability. Kristensen2025-ni and Kuznetsova2025-nu extend the ecological question to alternative and authoritarian-adjacent platforms: whether fragmentation into alternative platforms drives discursive polarization, and how pro-government Telegram channels in Russia and Belarus exploit forwarding affordances for coordinated narrative amplification. Read alongside Gerbaudo’s and Törnberg’s accounts of algorithmic clustering, these pieces suggest that platform fragmentation is not a return to plural publics but a proliferation of enclosed, unevenly moderated, and sometimes state-instrumentalized information silos.
The AI turn: hype, imaginaries, and political economy
The final and most forward-looking thread treats generative AI as the next-stage platformization event—and interrogates the discourses legitimating it. Dodds2026-df frames AI hype as a systemic infrastructure that redistributes resources and legitimacy well before technologies mature, with journalism itself complicit in reproducing it. Stanusch2026-ec and Hepp2026-oi examine how the AI industry narrates its own inevitability—the former through the Altman controversy’s “premediation” and “preclusion” strategies, the latter through the “quiet futuring” of Bay Area labs and communities (Effective Altruism, Rationalism) that supplies the ideational reservoir for Big Tech’s “loud futuring.” Vertesi2026-lv offers the sharpest structural corrective, arguing that AI accountability discourse is repeatedly diverted by five “decoys” (ontological, inevitability, disruption, safety, regulatory) that distract from the underlying “Project of AI”—a financialized world-building enterprise whose real stakes are network power and capital concentration, not algorithmic artifacts. Weinbrand2026-sf traces a parallel discursive contest specifically around Google’s AI Overviews, showing how corporate, journalistic, and SEO actors fight over the meaning of AI-mediated search while user and environmental concerns remain conspicuously absent. Topinka2026-hb closes this thread by theorizing “slopaganda”—AI content that persuades not through deception but through affective attunement to feed logics—as the culmination of platforms’ shift from belief-formation to engagement-optimization. Taken together, this final cluster suggests that the extractive and clustering logics diagnosed elsewhere in this topic are now being re-inscribed, at a new order of scale and opacity, into the infrastructures and discourses of generative AI—making the “platform society” of 2018 look, in retrospect, like only the first stage of a much longer trajectory.