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Abstract

Digital platforms have increasingly become accepted and trusted by European citizens as indispensable utilities for social interaction and communication in everyday life. This article aims to analyze how trust in and dependence of these ubiquitous platforms for mediated communication is configured and the kind of consequences this has for user (dis)empowerment and public values. Our analysis builds on insights from the domestication perspective and infrastructure studies. In order to illustrate our conceptual approach, we use the case of messaging apps. We demonstrate how these apps as an essential social infrastructure are entangled with a corporate-computational infrastructure. The entangling of both types of infrastructures leads to a paradox where users feel compelled to appropriate these socially indispensable apps in everyday life, while also making them dependent on their corporate control mechanisms. In order to get out of the paradox and empower users these infrastructures and their data sharing need to be disentangled. For this, we apply the notion of ‘infrastructural inversion’ as a way to surface opaque and hidden properties of the digital platforms. We conclude with a discussion of potential other routes for infrastructural inversion in order to establish data disentanglement that serves public interest values.

Keywords

Digital platforms domestication empowerment infrastructural inversion public values trust

Introduction

European democratic societies have been built on public values for empowering citizens, like human dignity, privacy, freedom of expression and information, liberty and security, non-discrimination and fairness. These are among others enshrined as fundamental human rights in the European Convention of Human Rights (Council of Europe, 1950) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (European Union, 2000). In order to safeguard these public interest ideals, we need to be watchful of the role, meaning and impact of corporate digital platforms for the governance of key sectors in Europe. Especially as we are moving towards ‘platform societies’, with digital platforms ‘[. . .] gradually infiltrating in, and converging with, the (offline, legacy) institutions and practices through which democratic societies are organized [. . .] [which] emphasizes the inextricable relation between online platforms and societal structures’ (van Dijck et al., 2018). The ubiquitous and deep (inter)penetration of digital platforms in everyday life of European citizens is giving these platforms the status and meaning of basic utilities for various constitutive elements of liberal democratic societies, like information provision, public debate, education, justice and health. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated this evolution, with social life becoming even more dependent on dominant digital platforms.

The latter is especially true for mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp that have become widespread intermediary platforms for social interaction and communication. In this article, we look more closely at how these messaging apps are trusted and appropriated by users and become an essential part of everyday life. We start from the premise that users’ social dependency of these computational infrastructures is being leveraged by corporate organizations for opaque data processing at the expense of public interest values. To assess the societal consequences, we look at how these data-driven applications disempower users and how empowerment can be regained. Empowerment is defined as the process of strengthening individuals, by which they get a grip on their situation and environment, through the acquisition of more control, sharpening their critical awareness and the stimulation of participation (Zimmerman and Rappaport, 1988). Empowerment in the context of social media platforms: ‘[. . .] is dependent on knowledge of how mechanisms operate and from what premise, as well as on the skills to change them’ (van Dijck, 2013: 17). When messaging apps become indispensable utilities or ‘obligatory passage points’ (Latour, 1992: 158) for interaction and communication in everyday life, users have little meaningful agency – especially from a social perspective – to oppose their data from being processed in an opaque and uncontrollable way (Pierson, in press). The user becomes disempowered from the moment the messaging platforms are widely adopted and yet they obfuscate their corporate-computational operating mechanisms and interests, thereby leveraging the loss of control of users over their data. For this, we dissect how these distinctive channels for private online communication are perceived as a ‘social infrastructure’ while simultaneously being entangled with a ‘corporate-computational infrastructure’.

Entangled infrastructures

The particular role digital platforms like messaging apps play for social interaction and communication in European societies is closely related to long-term changes in mediated communication as investigated in media and communication research (Schroeder, 2018). Castells (2009) identifies a transition towards ‘mass self-communication’, where the boundaries between mass and interpersonal communication have fundamentally blurred. Platforms for mass self-communication can present themselves as trustworthy ‘neutral’ facilitators, while curating mediated communication based on data and algorithms according to their corporate interests. In order to investigate these changes in mediated communication through mass self-communication, we need to merge social-cultural perspectives on media with techno-economic understanding (van Dijck, 2013: 28). Building on this twofold approach, we situate and centre the materiality of technological platforms for mass self-communication. We start from theories in media and communication that discuss how media technologies are accepted and trusted by users as a ‘social infrastructure’ in everyday life. This is complemented with a technological perspective of analyzing digital platforms as a ‘corporate-computational infrastructure’ mediating social interaction and communication. Here, we build on insights from infrastructure studies, making the bridge with the domain of science and technology studies (STS). The latter field is relevant, given its focus on the mutual shaping between (media) technologies and society (Gillespie et al., 2014).

This leads to our main thesis that revolves around a trust paradox for users. On the one hand users feel compelled to appropriate socially indispensable digital platforms for mass self-communication to serve their own purposes and hence empowering them as users. On the other hand users need to trust these digital infrastructures for their everyday practices and thereby become dependent on the platforms’ corporate-computational control mechanisms. Platforms take advantage of this user paradox by first positioning themselves as trusted tools becoming vital for everyday social life, after which the data generated through this dependent position can be converted into trade value, foremost for data commodification and personalized advertising. Once the latter is established the driving forces for further developments of these platforms are steered by commercial motives, potentially in disregard of public interest values.

When reframing and analyzing the trust paradox from the perspective of infrastructure studies we observe the entanglement of the two types of infrastructures. The social infrastructure is created through the appropriation and domestication of media technologies, while the corporate-computational infrastructure is based on the integration of technological and business decisions and motives. Both types of infrastructure are consciously rolled out and strategically entangled by digital platform companies. For the social infrastructure to be successful it ideally mimics existing ways of mediated communication, with the corporate-computational infrastructure intervening as little as possible by being opaque en black-boxed for the users and the general public.

We first elaborate on social and corporate-computational infrastructure notions and analyze how the trust paradox takes shape through their entanglement. This is followed by the concept of ‘infrastructural inversion’, applied as a gateway to enhance user awareness and empowerment by disentangling private-public motives for data processing.

Digital platforms as social and corporate-computational infrastructures

The way that media technologies are appropriated and taken for granted as an essential social infrastructure in everyday life has since long been part of media and communication research. Cultural studies scholars in the early 1990s proposed the notion of ‘domestication’ (Silverstone et al., 1990). This is defined as the gradual process by which (digital) media artefacts are consumed and ‘tamed’ within the sociocultural context of everyday life (Pierson, 2005). Through that process the domesticated digital media technologies disappear into the daily practices. They are not perceived as (savage) technologies anymore but offer ‘ontological security’ as natural extensions of personal interactions and social communication (Giddens, 1990). This gradual shift of people becoming one with their digital environment has later also been highlighted by other scholars in media and communication studies, through notions like ‘media life’ (Deuze, 2012), ‘mediatization’ (Couldry and Hepp, 2017), and the ‘digital condition’ (Stalder, 2018).

The platforms companies themselves also make statements in their discourse of building a social infrastructure (Rider and Murakami Wood, 2019), becoming indispensable in social life (Edwards, 2003: 187). For example, Facebook’s CEO posted an extensive manifesto announcing the changing direction from ‘connecting people’ to building a ‘social infrastructure’ (Zuckerberg, 2017). The platform was henceforth positioned as a ubiquitous and essential gateway supporting ‘social’ services, reflecting ‘Facebook’s changing ambition from being the “operating system of our laptops and desk-tops” to becoming “the operating system of our lives”’ (quoted in Nieborg and Helmond, 2019: 4; Vaidhyanathan, 2018: 99). By combining and co-opting concepts like ‘social’ and ‘infrastructure’, these social media technologies aim to appropriate the connotations of utilities and infrastructure as non-commercial services for the common good and to normalize the commodification of connectivity and user data (Nieborg and Helmond, 2019: 16).

Given the centrality of digital platforms in everyday life we also observe how they increasingly constitute the social and material infrastructures at the user level (Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019). In order to investigate and assess that idea, we need to look to what extent and in which way this embeddedness takes place. For this, we take an infrastructure studies perspective, joining the ‘infrastructural turn’ in media and communication studies and Internet studies (Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019). Based on characteristics typical for infrastructures, like scale and indispensability, these platforms become essential for social and cultural life and gain footholds as the modern-day equivalents of telephone, railroad and other key infrastructures in society. Van Dijck (2020) situates the ‘infrastructuralization of intermediary platforms’ as part of a metaphorical lens of a tree, to explain information ecosystems as hierarchical and interdependent structures. From that perspective intermediary platforms such as social networking and messaging services provide a computational infrastructure. In the Western world, the latter are almost fully controlled by the five Big Tech US-based GAFAM companies (Alphabet-Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) (Plantin et al., 2016).

Infrastructural inversion

In order to address user empowerment in the context of entangled infrastructures we elaborate on the notion of ‘infrastructural inversion’ as coined by Bowker (1994). The notion is understood as struggling against the tendency of infrastructure to disappear by operating as a gestalt switch, a figure-ground reversal to everyday operational processes of the invisible work that enables infrastructures to function instead of the work that infrastructures unnoticeably support (Simonsen et al., 2020). Plantin and Punathambekar (2019) notice how media scholars have responded to Bowker and Star’s (1999) call for ‘infrastructural inversions’ (p. 34), in order to study the world-making dimensions of media and communication technologies that we take for granted. This approach fits in the idea of not only applying infrastructural inversion as a conceptual-analytic strategy but also proposing this approach as an empirical-ethnographic strategy (Simonsen et al., 2020: 122).

The gradual domestication of and trust in digital platforms as an essential social infrastructure for user interaction and communication is being entangled with the strategic market-driven approach of designing and extending the corporate-computational infrastructure. This constitutes the basis for user disempowerment as defined by van Dijck (2013). It obfuscates how and from what premise platforms actually operate, eliding the agency to change that. Star and Bowker (2002) stipulate that users foremost need to become aware of the social and political work that infrastructures are doing, and then look for ways to change that as need be (p. 160). Infrastructural inversion reveals opaque and hidden properties of the corporate-computational infrastructure of digital platforms that have become a social infrastructure, and makes them negotiable. This establishes critical awareness of disempowering consequences of these entangled infrastructures and creates opportunities for change.

Case of messaging apps

We use the case study of ‘messaging apps’, ‘chat apps’ or ‘mobile messenger apps’ to illustrate how the trust paradox based on the entangled social and corporate-computational infrastructures concretely takes shape and how infrastructural inversion empowers users. Messaging apps are defined as a form of personal media that typically enable de-institutional and de-professional content through symmetrical mediated interaction (Lüders, 2008). The two most popular messaging apps worldwide are WhatsApp with over 2 billion active monthly users and Messenger with around 1.3 billion users, both owned by Facebook (Tankovska, 2021). As of March 2019, over 41 million messages are sent globally every minute (Clement, 2019). They are also the two most popular messaging apps in Europe, chiefly used for mobile social communication, personalized expression and information exchange (Levinson, 2018). Mobile messaging apps are also blurring the lines between messaging and mobile social networks. For example, apps for photo-sharing (like Instagram and Snapchat) have added private or direct messaging functions, by which they become more like messaging platforms.

Messaging apps as social infrastructure

Before messaging applications took off, people where accustomed to use texting via SMS (or Short Message System) as a convenient and efficient way of text-based communication (Fibæk Bertel and Ling, 2016). Fueled by mobile Internet and smartphone growth, digital platforms have introduced apps since the early 2010s to complement and replace SMS texting (McGoogan, 2016). Their initial appeal was based on the fact that messaging was seen as gratis (being included in the mobile Internet subscription), whereas SMS messages were not. Digital platforms have been able to position messaging apps as a key social infrastructure by first mimicking the well-known texting. People became accustomed to these modes of communication as being trustworthy means for mobile interaction. With the introduction of enhanced features and affordances over time, such as group chats, voice calls, video calls, photo sharing and stickers, messaging apps have shifted from one-to-one text-based communication channels to many-to-many multimedia communication channels.

Particularly young users have been using messaging apps for private communication, which was originally also the case for SMS texting (Fibæk Bertel and Ling, 2016). Traditional social network platforms (like Facebook website) have been increasingly perceived as public communication channels, less fit for so-called ‘original sharing’ (Oremus, 2016). The latter refers to posts by people about themselves and their personal lives, as opposed to content being liked and shared from elsewhere on the web. The role of original sharing was then taken over by messaging apps focussing on private communication, but this has again shifted by allowing ‘group messaging’ and even communication with a larger public (Read, 2019). For example, the maximum group size for Facebook Messenger is 250 people, for WhatsApp 256, for Signal 1,000, for Telegram 200,000 and for Discord this even increases to 500,000. In this way, messaging apps have also become an important instrument for sharing ‘non-original’ content and enable a social infrastructure for public debate and mass communication. The latter has led to an increased risk of amplifying contentious content, like disinformation and hate speech.

Various user studies have demonstrated how social media and in particular messaging apps have become an indispensable social infrastructure for public interaction and communication in Europe. The Eurobarometer study of 2019 shows that just over three quarters (76%) of European Internet users use online social networks at least two or three times a month, with a majority (56%) using them daily or almost daily. The latter is an increase of 22 points in comparison to 2015 (European Union, 2019). More detailed figures of 2019 in Flanders (Belgium) based on a yearly survey of digital media use demonstrate that 91% of the people uses at least one social network monthly (Vandendriessche and De Marez, 2020). The survey also identifies how dependent users are on these social media: 25% of all respondents state they cannot do a day without social media and more than half (52%) experience them as being time-intensive. One third (49 minutes) of the time that smartphones are used daily (2.5 hours) goes to social media and chat apps. When focussing on messaging apps we find the preponderance of Facebook services being used at least monthly: WhatsApp (73%) and Facebook Messenger (69%) by far outpace other chat services like Apple iMessage (17%), SnapChat (15%), Google Hangouts (6%), Signal (3%) and Telegram (3%). Only SMS texting, as the traditional way of mobile messaging, is still used daily by 45% of the population, but is in steep decline coming from 84% in 2009 (Vandendriessche and De Marez, 2020).

Messaging apps as corporate-computational infrastructure

From a technical-computational perspective SMS texting runs on operator-based mobile telecommunication networks, while messaging apps operate via Internet networks and protocols. The latter apps are mostly based on commodified data transport for purposes of targeted advertising, and therefore more open to corporate dataveillance. In that process they have become a keystone of the mobile app ecosystem. This corporate-computational perspective leads to a landscape of four different types of messaging apps: (1) apps developed internally by big tech companies and then spun off as separate platform instances for extending data (and content) commodification (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Google Chat), (2) external apps acquired by big tech companies and then (gradually) integrated for centralized storage, processing and commodification of data (and content) (e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram Direct Messages), (3) autonomously developed apps based on commodifying data (and content) for advertising purposes (e.g. Snapchat/Snap, Viber/Rakuten) and (4) privacy-oriented autonomously developed apps without data commodification (e.g. Signal, Threema, Telegram). This differentiation is essential for understanding the political economy behind the corporate-computational infrastructure.

Research in platform studies and infrastructure studies has found the most popular messaging apps are platform instances strategically rolled out from an integrated technical and business rationale. This is clearly exemplified by the financial and institutional analysis of the evolution and infrastructural properties of Facebook Messenger by Nieborg and Helmond (2019). They observe how most substantial changes in this messaging app have been taking place ‘under the hood’. Instead of a narrow and static understanding of Facebook as single destination mostly visible to end-users, they offer an analytical framework that dissects the invisible business and technical dimensions in tandem. Both framework dimensions define the corporate-computational infrastructure perspective, where mobile messaging apps act as the front end in order to enable and optimize the back end data sharing between end-users, advertisers, institutions, content developers, and businesses in the mobile ecosystem. In that way the front end platform instance of Messenger has become an exemplary central data intermediary in the mobile ecosystem of Facebook, being the default connective layer on top of mobile operating systems, supplanting ‘generative’ technologies like making calls and SMS-based texting.

However, in everyday practice users do not experience these apps as sophisticated platform instances of a corporate-computational infrastructure, but trust them as mundane tools for social interaction and communication. Although many users are aware that social media are based on monetization through advertising and data, they generally seem to have resigned (Draper and Turow, 2019). The study of digital media use in 2019 in Flanders (Belgium) finds that over half of the Flemings (53%) do know how social media companies monetize their platforms. Yet the use of advertising for making money is overall disliked, with almost three quarters (73%) being annoyed by advertising on free services and only 14% of Flemings enjoy the idea of receiving personalized online advertising. With regards to the user’s control over the kind of the personal data being collected, almost two third of the respondents (65%) state they have no control anymore, and almost three quarters (73%) indicate that companies are not transparent about their data collection (Vandendriessche and De Marez, 2020). The Eurobarometer of 2019 also indicates a widespread worry among European citizens that express to have only partial or no control over the data they provide online. In all, 62% of these respondents are concerned to very concerned about this (European Union, 2019).

Entangled infrastructures and public values

The entanglement of the social and corporate-computational infrastructure of messaging apps has led to disempowerment as it helps to leverage the intense everyday use of these apps for data capturing and processing for commercial and surveillance aims. By emphasizing their social role and by playing down their data monetization interests, they appear to be media that just facilitate social interactions and are henceforth easily domesticated, just like other media in the past. This entanglement is even deliberately obfuscated, as explained by Zuboff (2019) discussing the emergence of surveillance capitalism. With the obfuscated and complex character of data commodification, it is not obvious for everyday users to become aware and understand how these platforms really operate and particularly how they differ from one another in terms of their monetization and data strategy (Heyman and Pierson, 2015). And even if people are aware of this, they mostly have no choice of to accept this, because otherwise they cannot use the ‘gratis’ service.

All this often happens at the expense of public interest values, as demonstrated by many studies on the impact of data collection and sharing in the mobile app ecosystem for data privacy and consumer rights. Already in 2010 the Wall Street Journal reported on invasive industry practices of online tracking on Android and iOS apps, in their investigative series ‘Your apps are watching you’ (Thurm and Kane, 2010). It was found that around half of the 100 most popular apps transferred data like location and unique device ID not only to developers but also to third party companies and advertising networks, without the users’ awareness or consent. In particular developers of free apps were prone to technically integrate tracking modules that exploit data for targeted advertising and other purposes (Christl and Spiekermann, 2016). More than 10 years later, the situation has not improved much. A range of studies has demonstrated how mobile apps are still deeply invading data privacy without users’ awareness or understanding (Manjoo, 2020; Valentino-DeVries et al., 2018). The Norwegian consumer organization demonstrated in detail how a large number of opaque entities, virtually unknown to consumers, are receiving personal data about interests, habits, and behavior every time they use their phones (Forbrukerrådet, 2020). Their technical analysis of popular mobile apps, among which messaging apps, revealed a large number of serious privacy infringements, being representative of widespread corporate practices. Users have no meaningful ways to resist or otherwise protect themselves from the consequences of these practices, among which different forms of discrimination, manipulation, exclusion, widespread fraud and the chilling effects of massive commercial surveillance. Besides contributing to the erosion of trust in the digital industry, these issues may also have harmful consequences for human autonomy and society at large. This was also confirmed by Amnesty International (2019) when they revealed how systematic surveillance and data-driven persuasion by big tech companies are posing a systemic threat to human rights.

Infrastructural inversion in messaging apps

In order to safeguard public values and empower users both types of infrastructures in messaging apps and their data sharing need to be disentangled. For this, we build on the notion of infrastructural inversion, as way to reveal hidden infrastructural properties and increase critical user awareness for changing user attitudes and practices.

This is exemplified in the case of messaging apps by the sudden peak in downloads of the privacy-focussed messaging services Signal and Telegram in the beginning of 2021, at the expense of corporate data-driven messaging service WhatsApp. The churn happened after Facebook announced it would start sharing the data between WhatsApp and other Facebook services, by removing a section of the international privacy policy (outside the European Union) which previously let people opt out of sharing personal data with Facebook for the first 30 days. This was announced somewhat accidentally through a pop-up alert on the WhatsApp messaging app since January 6th, stating that it is updating its terms and privacy policy and that you need to tap the ‘agree’ button in order to accept the new terms that would take effect on February 8th in order to keep on using WhatsApp (BBC, 2021). This way of surfacing a change in personal data sharing in the corporate-computational infrastructure, combined with a lot of media attention, turbocharged a user exodus from WhatsApp which already slowly began in early July 2020, when the company initially announced the plans to implement the new privacy policy (Hern, 2021a).

As a result, over the first 3 weeks of January 2021 Signal gained 7.5 million and Telegram 25 million users globally. WhatsApp felt obliged to delay the implementation of the new terms until May 15th, and run a damage limitation PR campaign to explain more explicitly to users the upcoming changes in data sharing (Hern, 2021b). The UK information commissioner explained the situation as follows: ‘Users expect companies to maintain their trust and not to suddenly change the contract that they have with the users’ (Hern, 2021a). Users trust to have a ‘contract’ with messaging apps that offers them a social infrastructure for everyday communication exchange with interlocutors they know. However, when infrastructural inversion reveals that also other unwanted third parties and data exchanges in the corporate-computational infrastructure are involved, these users lose their trust. In addition to revealing unexpected data leakage this also refers to other opaque infrastructural properties such as algorithmic curation and content moderation. This is illustrated by another prominent event that took place in the same period. On January 6th 2021, the US Capitol Hill riots occurred, with Facebook suspending president Trump from its platform a day later. This made very visible the dominant role these platforms have as gatekeepers of public debate. As a consequence, many Trump followers and fans switched from Facebook and Twitter to other platforms like Signal, Telegram and 4chan (Frenkel, 2021).

Conclusion

The infrastructural inversion in messaging apps demonstrates how trust in corporate-computational infrastructures is constantly at odds with users’ trust in messaging apps as social infrastructures. Platform corporations are burdened with this trust paradox and tend to emphasize monetization at the expense of public values. It leads to a situation of users being empowered by these platforms and simultaneously being disempowered by relentless corporate dataveillance, with adverse societal consequences. However, maintaining trust of users in the long run will depend on platforms’ ability and willingness to anchor public (institutional) values into their systems, breaking them open, showing users how they work and deliberating how this benefits the common good. Establishing this long-term public trust foremost requires so-called ‘data disentanglement’, that is, making clear how the market-driven capturing, processing and sharing of data for social and public purposes does not happen at the expense of public interest values.

However, until now most big tech platforms do not have a good track record to earn this type of public trust. As long as they do not sufficiently take up their public responsibility, we need to rely on other approaches for data disentanglement. The latter is facilitated by infrastructural inversion, as a way to deploy openness, transparency and explain ability of corporate-computational systems. This can happen in different ways: through user practices, through technological tools, through regulatory affordances and through media coverage and exposure of industry practices. The latter was illustrated by the surge in downloads of privacy-oriented apps Signal and Telegram, as an alternative for WhatsApp announcing explicit data sharing with Facebook (Murphy, 2021). On the level of user practices, experimenting with active non-participation in social media platforms (Casemajor et al., 2015) can be a powerful stimulus to create awareness around dependency and trust (Hill, 2019).

Another way of applying infrastructural inversion is through technological tools that reveal and possibly block data sharing with third parties. These tools can be external, like privacy-enhancing tools (e.g. PETs like Ghostery) and adblockers (e.g. AdGuard), but they can also be built into the platforms (e.g. Apple’s iOS privacy labels for apps and App Tracking Transparency feature) (Ha and Panzarino, 2021; Statt, 2020). Transparency through infrastructural inversion in the corporate-computational infrastructure can also be facilitated through regulation. For example, data access request mechanisms enabled by the General Data Protection Regulation (Art.15) offer users (as data subjects) the possibility to obtain access to any personal data being held and processed by platforms (Pop Stefanija and Pierson, 2020). The perspective of infrastructural inversion creates a kind of friction that enables users to become critically aware about their entanglement and empowers them to take action. This can be seen as a crucial step for furthering user trust and public values in European platform societies.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Digital platforms as entangled infrastructures: Addressing public values and trust in messaging apps

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Entangled infrastructures

Digital platforms as social and corporate-computational infrastructures

Infrastructural inversion

Case of messaging apps

Messaging apps as social infrastructure

Messaging apps as corporate-computational infrastructure

Entangled infrastructures and public values

Infrastructural inversion in messaging apps

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

References