Platforms and Cultural Production. Thomas Poell

conceptual framework to account for such variation; in particular, it overlooked the particular labor, creative, and democratic practices that emerge in platform-dependent modes of cultural production.

To broaden the scope of inquiry, Brooke joined the project. The three of us decided to solicit research on a wide variety of industry segments and geographical contexts, as well as on the gendered, classed, and racialized specificity of platform-dependent modes of cultural production. We were fortunate that Zizi Papacharissi, editor-in-chief of Social Media + Society, agreed to host two special collections in the journal, which gave us a productive forum through which to vastly expand the conversation concerning the relationship between platforms and cultural production. The response to our call for papers far exceeded our expectations. Given the diversity of contributing scholars, as well as the urgency of the topic at hand, we sought to bring the authors together to discuss a first full draft of their papers. Hence, in October 2018, we convened at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. In the intimate setting of the Centre’s historical Coach House, surrounded by old images and book covers from Canada’s famed media theorist, we spent two intense days exchanging ideas, soliciting guidance, and providing feedback. These critical discussions proved enormously productive in bringing the papers into conversation with each other. After a year-long process of revisions and external peer review, the twenty-six contributions were published in two special collections of Social Media + Society, in November 2019 and August 2020 (Duffy et al., 2019; Nieborg, Duffy, Poell, 2020).

      The collections were specifically focused on the industrial creation, distribution, marketing, and monetization of cultural content. The articles, moreover, spanned a wide range of segments and genres that included live-streaming, booktubing, game and app development, music streaming, podcasting, social media content creation, webtoons, internet-distributed television, public service media, and the digital vintage economy, among others. The geographic terrain covered was similarly diverse and involved instances of cultural production across Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US. Both roused and energized by our interactions with these contributors and their work, we realized that we needed to take this project to its logical conclusion; hence, the idea for this book was born.

      Our ambition with this book is to advance the theoretical framework we introduced in our initial New Media & Society article published in 2018. This framework is developed further in the first half of the book and is now recast as an institutional perspective on platformization. At the same time, we are committed to doing justice to the wide variety of emerging cultural practices that can be observed across platforms and regions of the world. These emerging practices are just as much part and parcel of the processes of platformization as are institutional changes in markets, infrastructures, and governance. From the perspective developed in the second half of the book, platformization involves vital shifts in practices of labor, creativity, and democracy in the cultural industries. Overall, the book aims to provide researchers and students working at the intersection of platforms and the cultural industries with a comprehensive framework to systematically examine and compare the particular industry segments and practices that they are studying.

We are thankful to the many colleagues and students who made this journey with us. We would like to express our gratitude first and foremost to a number of colleagues who generously helped us with their critical comments and generative ideas: Amanda Lotz, José van Dijck, Bernhard Rieder, and Dwayne Winseck. We are also thankful to our students, especially Maggie MacDonald and Ouejdane Sabbah, who read and commented on the first draft of the manuscript. Furthermore, we would like to thank the contributors to the Social Media + Society special collections, who provided us with new insights and rich case studies on which to draw: Arturo Arriagada, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Sophie Bishop, Tiziano Bonini, Robyn Caplan, Aymar Jean Christian, Samantha Close, David Craig, Stuart Cunningham, Faithe Day, Mark Díaz, Stefanie Duguay, Karin van Es, Maxwell Foxman, Alessandro Gandini, Tarleton Gillespie, Alison Hearn, David Hesmondhalgh, Emily Hund, Francisco Ibáñez, Mark R. Johnson, Ellis Jones, Daniel Joseph, Ji-Hyeon Kim, Jeroen de Kloet, Tamara Kneese, Jian Lin, Jeremy Wade Morris, Annemarie Navar-Gill, Victoria O’Meara, Michael Palm, William Clyde Partin, Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin, Caitlin Petre, Robert Prey, Andreas Rauh, Marc Steinberg, John L. Sullivan, José Miguel Tomasena, Cynthia Wang, Jamie Woodcock, Chris J. Young, and Jun Yu.

      Thanks as well go to the tutorial students, whose feedback helped us to enhance the focus of the book at an early stage of its conception: Lukas Beckenbauer, Jueling Hu, Daphne Idiz, Vanessa Richter, and Ziwen Tang. The students of the research master Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, meanwhile, provided rich feedback on the first draft of the manuscript in the course of Research Practices in Media Studies (2020–1). Additionally, we are grateful to Mary Savigar, Sarah Dancy, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, and Stephanie Homer from Polity, who patiently and steadily guided and supported us through the writing and production process. We would also like to acknowledge the generosity of a number of institutions that sponsored this project: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS), the Cornell Center for Social Sciences (CCSS), the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, Queensland University of Technology, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Toronto, and Cornell University. Collectively, such support made for an all the more generative collaborative process by allowing us to work together in person – at least, until most of the world became gripped by COVID-19. To this end, we would like to close by expressing our appreciation to the family members, friends, and colleagues who provided support, encouragement, and patience, especially as the trials of researching and writing a book intensified under the weight of a global pandemic. Heartfelt thanks, in particular, go to Emma, Jonathan, and Raphael Poell, Robert Shea Terrell, and Leslie Pilszak.

       Amsterdam, Toronto, Ithaca, 2021

1 Introduction

      “Big brands fund terror,” read the frontpage of the British daily newspaper The Times on February 9, 2017; below the arresting headline was a screengrab of an online ad that – unbeknownst to the client – appeared in a YouTube video openly endorsing jihadists (Mostrous, 2017). According to The Times investigation, YouTube’s automated system of placing ads had paired promotions for consumer products and charitable organizations with videos championing radical and terrorist groups, including the Islamic State and Combat 18, a pro-Nazi faction. Several weeks later, the Guardian followed up with a report on the six-figure sums that “hate preachers” had generated from YouTube’s unwitting arsenal of ad sponsors – among them household brands like L’Oréal, Sainsbury’s, Nissan, and even the Guardian itself (Neate, 2017). Indeed, the report chronicled a kaleidoscopic range of extremist content funded through the platform: anti-Western propaganda from a Salafi Muslim preacher, videos by former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard David Duke, and anti-LGBTQ and anti-Semitic sentiments expressed by a fundamentalist pastor.

      Asked to respond to the high-profile social media scandal, Ronan Harris, a representative for YouTube’s parent company Google, offered: “We believe strongly in the freedom of speech and expression on the web – even when that means we don’t agree with the views expressed” (Neate, 2017). While Harris went on to clarify that Google’s policies prohibit “videos with hate speech, gory or offensive content” from appearing adjacent to ads, he conceded that “we don’t always get it right.” Dissatisfied with Google’s rhetorical deflection, the Guardian – along with the BBC and the UK government – subsequently pulled all advertising from the video-sharing platform.

This move was among the catalysts for the so-called 2017 “Adpocalypse” – a term invoked by YouTube creators to describe the concerted efforts of brands to boycott YouTube advertising. In total, as many as 250 brands from the US and the UK threatened to halt their digital advertising campaigns. Confronted with such collective pushback, Google quickly changed YouTube’s policies to be more “advertiser-friendly” (Kumar, 2019). Among the changes in YouTube’s governance framework was an option for advertisers to exclude broad categories of content from appearing alongside their ads. These categories ranged from