Social media and platform work: Stories,practices,and workers’ organisation

Abstract

This article introduces the special issue, ‘Social Media and Platform Work: Stories, Practices, and Workers’ Organisation’. In recent years, platform labour studies have increasingly focused on how the growing platformisation of labour has changed work activities, labour processes, work organising, identities, and collectivities. The literature has highlighted the role of media, communication, and social media in platform labour, but more research is needed on these interrelationships. Precisely, the analysis of platform work is necessary due to its complexity and interest in political, economic, social, cultural, and health terms. Throughout the special issue, different contributions are presented that analyse how the emergence of these new jobs brings a set of inequalities that complexify the notion of ‘work’ and dilute workers’ rights, leading to a precarious situation. The use of social media plays a crucial role in the platformisation of labour as it enables the creation of social relationships between workers but also opens the door to communicating, disseminating their work, and even learning informally and about their work. However, the use of social media can also lead to a precarious combination of platform work and content creation – or cultural production. In this regard, it is worth noting to analyse and approach the relationship between platform work and social networks precisely by addressing both perspectives, considering possible vulnerabilities derived from these situations and situations of precariousness.

Introduction

The platform labour studies have intensified their research agenda in recent years (van Doorn et al., 2023; Poell et al., 2022; De Stefano, 2016), understanding how the growing platformisation of labour (Casilli and Posada, 2019) has changed work activities, labour process, work organising, identities, and collectivities. Although some of this literature (e.g. Woodcock and Graham, 2020) has highlighted that media, communication, and social media play a role in platform labour, there is still much to be researched around these interrelationships.

There can be different types of platform work. For example, content creation for a platform such as YouTube, delivery service for a company such as Glovo, or delivery services for people as a means of transportation to move around a city, such as that offered by Uber. These are just a few examples of what we can categorise as platform work. All of them have different casuistry and must be considered and analysed in detail, as each has a certain degree of complexity and differs, to a greater or lesser extent, with other types of work. The exhaustive analysis of platform work is necessary not only because of the importance it seems to be taking during the last decade as an emerging labour practice but also because of its complexity and interest in political, economic, social, cultural and even health terms (Nieborg and Poell, 2018). The complexity of the framework that makes up platform work is already intrinsic to the capitalist economic system. It is intertwined with communication, consumption, and specific sociological behaviour patterns derived from these new forms of work (Van Dijck et al., 2018).

Back to the platform work typology, the initial group of platform-based work includes digital platforms that cater to individual users, such as social media. The second kind pertains to platforms that function as intermediaries for exchanging goods and services, such as e-commerce and business-to-business (B2B). Lastly, platforms facilitate labour exchange between businesses, workers, and consumers. This category encompasses digital labour platforms like Deliveroo, which enables the exchange of delivery services.

In social terms, the analysis of platform work is especially relevant because the emergence and proliferation of these new jobs are already undeniable. However, these growth processes bring a set of inequalities that complexify the notion of ‘work’ and, simultaneously, under the mantra of flexibility, dilute workers’ rights (Poell et al., 2022). This rights’ dilution can be understood as a blurring of work and life borders, denying any possibility of improvement in working conditions and converting precarity into a ‘normal’ state of these types of works. As Standing (2013) points out, a precarious situation exposes workers to degrading treatment – or working conditions – particularly when the economic compensation is under the minimum salary. In addition, this worker precarious collective, or ‘the precariat’ as established by Standing (2013), is fragmented into multiple types of jobs, with changing functions, workplaces, and responsibilities, blurring options to centralise queries, and, in the end, challenging any vindication (Fusaro, 2021).

All this resonates with some of the irregular employment practices typical of the platformisation of labour and the informal working arrangements, far from any safeguard guarantees associated with health and work organisations, such as social security or union organisation (Casilli and Posada, 2019).

Precisely because of the inherent precariousness of platformisation, the use of social media takes on a relevant role. Social networks can be the origin of social relationships between workers, but also a means of communication, dissemination of their work and even informal learning.

The network’s visibility is a channel that, whether used (or not) for protest purposes, is undoubtedly a source of organisation among platform workers. Although, simultaneously, the use of media can generate a translation from platform work to cultural production based on the creation of content (Pires et al., 2023a), it can also entail an overlap, that is, a precarious (and exploitative) combination of both worlds, that of platform work and that of content or cultural production on social media.

In a way, the analysis of cultural production through social media can take different readings: On the one hand, it can be a source of visibility and vindication in the face of the precariousness of these new forms of work (Chan, 2019; Corbel et al., 2022), but on the other hand, it promotes and encourages the circle of unpaid cultural production, this time under the mantra of creativity – coupled with the flexibility (Duffy, 2016). Both processes, translation (from one type of work to the other) or overlapping (combination of both jobs), imply an absorption of the precariousness of both worlds. For all these reasons, it is essential to focus on platform workers’ use of social media (Pires et al., 2023a).

Platform workers use social media as a form of communication, socialisation, and organisation. As such, platforms and apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube, and TikTok, among others, can be valuable tools for platform workers to share tips, stories, and practices. For instance, workers share stories on social media about their work routines and everyday practices (Poell et al., 2022). In the platform capitalism context, social media can also be a place for work self-promotion and the emergence of workers acting as influencers and/or entrepreneurs (Soriano and Cabañes, 2020). Therefore, developing new understandings of the different uses, discourses, practices, and stories that emerge when platform work intersects with social media is crucial. Furthermore, platform workers can use social media to bring to the fore different forms of exploitation, discrimination, and inequalities around platform power, and also about consumers of the platform services (Ravenelle, 2019). Thus, it has become necessary to interrogate how platform work is reinforcing pre-existing inequalities in terms of gender, class, age, and country of origin, among others, as well as to understand the role that social media play in mitigating or increasing these disparities (Van Doorn, 2017).

By joining forces in this endeavour, we introduce a special issue titled ‘Social Media and Platform Work: Stories, Practices, and Workers’ Organisation’ to deepen the understanding of how platform workers engage with social media by including multiple perspectives.

Encouragingly, we have registered a broad interest in contributing to our special issue. This has allowed us to consider and include research works from around the globe – from North to Global South, particularly, from people with diverse academic backgrounds and disciplines. Fortunately, the interest in the call for papers has allowed us to diversify the academic contributions we have included in the special issue.

We have intended to include contributions that critically interrogate how platform workers engage with social media and explore the ways social media platforms can be critical spaces for workers to collaborate, socialise, and learn informally about this type of labour. To do so, questioning inequalities associated with platform work has been crucial to raising questions about social media’s centrality for workers’ organisations, strikes, fissures among the collective, or other forms of emerging solidarities. Therefore, this research compilation aims to critically link scholarly contributions with struggling and emerging realities of the real world.

In order to contextualise the articles that are part of this special issue, we have addressed three main thematic lines. The first deals with the role of social media among platform workers in terms of socialisation, solidarity processes, literacy – and learning – and narratives – or discourses. The second deals with the importance of affordances in platform work. Furthermore finally, the third focuses on social networks as a form of work, focussing on content creators and the uncertainties associated with this type of work.

The role of social media for platform workers: Socialisation, solidarity, literacy, and narratives

In this special issue, a significant issue touched by all the contributions is the attempt to understand the role of social media among different kinds of platform work in different local milieus. Therefore, we delve into this role to unveil the many aspects that make social media fundamental to platform workers.

First, social media is critical for platform workers, such as crowd workers, on-demand workers via apps (De Stefano, 2016) and cultural creators (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). This is because social media offer digital spaces for socialisation since platform workers need a place to encounter. That is to say, social media aids workers in understanding and negotiating processes and workers’ actions, based on shared stories about their everyday work, as processes of communication and organisation.

Therefore, social media and social media groups provide spaces for social facilitation and collective organising for workers who usually are geographically spread out, and platform workers use those spaces to share strategies for overcoming the difficulties of platform labour (Soriano and Cabañes, 2020). Consequently, social media is seen as a place where platform workers can establish bonds of entrepreneur solidarity ‘that mitigate their experience of the worst effects of the reality that they are at the base of the global information economy’ (Soriano and Cabañes, 2020: 4). As pointed by Yu et al. (2022: 117), the platform worker solidarity can be manifested in different forms: such as sharing news about how to increase earnings/orders, aiding with equipment assistance, helping newcomers to get started with the new job, sharing real-time news on the work, providing emergency assistance, and trying to unpack the platform algorithms and ways of functioning. Furthermore, social media groups work as a place to cope with stress and precarious conditions, as well as help platform workers ‘overcome the inherent loneliness and social disconnection of their working conditions’ (Mieruch and McFarlane, 2022: 2). This occurs by enacting a sense of shared experience through visual and textual posts (Corbel et al., 2022; Soriano and Cabañes, 2020), in which some include humour and memes (Soriano and Cabañes, 2020). Nonetheless, social media also serves as platform for workers to share potential strategies and information to thrive and succeed in their work activities as ‘skill makers’ (Soriano and Panaligan, 2019).

In that respect, social media provides channels for platform workers to learn and share their experiences. Social media and digital platforms provide an infrastructure for workers to carry literacy practices via informal learning strategies. That is, social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and instant messaging applications (e.g. Telegram, Whatsapp, and WeChat) prompt learning-by-doing through the ‘apprenticeship model’ (Bates, 2015; Pires et al., 2022). The apprenticeship model is often related to vocational training, where a more experienced tradesperson or journeyperson models behaviour, and the apprentice aims to follow this model (Bates, 2015: 100). Therefore, it is not uncanny to see how platform workers have different roles, such as experienced peers (teachers) and less experienced or dedicated peers (learners) across social media. Some become bloggers that discuss their work knowledge with audiences (Chan, 2019; Guerra and D’Andréa, 2022) or work as coaches within social media groups (Soriano and Cabañes, 2020). Those figures are the platform workers who materialise a precise intersection of platformisation of labour (Casilli and Posada, 2019) and platformisation of cultural production (Poell et al., 2022) as they transform their work activity into cultural content. Within this frame of reference, Chan’s seminal work (2019) has detected that Uber drivers that perform expertise on YouTube go beyond explaining the trade of being a driver in its traditional sense. They also share their ability and experience in understanding practically the platform affordances and the algorithmic encounters.

Similarly, Guerra and D’Andréa (2022) have pointed out the capacity of celebrity platform workers, such as ubertubers, to be invested in explaining how to navigate the app they use for working and developing tactics and strategies to minimise the app’s instabilities. Besides, these micro-celebrities dedicate themselves to scrutinising the application and creating content on increasing or getting a stable earning. Therefore, social media facilitates the circulation of multiple experiences and narratives about platform work.

Narratives are inherent to the human way of understanding life. Consequently, there are different narratives surrounding platform work. One prevalent is the narrative of not having a boss supervising the worker (Woodcock, 2020). This was widely spread by the companies that own different platform companies dedicated to tasks and work-on-demand via apps. Also, it was accompanied by the idea of having autonomy and flexibility that can have different meanings depending on the worker (Anwar and Graham, 2020). Since different platforms can include constraints in the working practices of platform workers, nevertheless, also ‘flexibility for one can be uncertainty for someone else and different platforms may have different time management practices of their own, which can further influence workers’ flexibility’ (Anwar and Graham, 2020: 241). Therefore, Woodcock (2019) has already mentioned that one of the main preconditions for the emergence of the gig economy was the ‘desire for flexibility for/from workers’. (6). However, how do workers follow those narratives in relation to their worker identities on social media? As Mieruch and McFarlane (2022) pointed out, social media is a crucial venue for developing and contesting identity narratives. Therefore, the authors have identified two narratives related to delivery riders in Thailand that emerged on Facebook groups: the hero and worker narratives.

On the one hand, the hero narrative undermines collective action usually present in the worker narrative, as it prompts individual work and considers the rider a ‘good worker’ because it can succeed alone despite the precarious conditions. It is associated with the narratives of flexibility and autonomous work. On the other hand, the worker narrative emphasises using social media to organise protests and collective action to defend workers’ rights.

While those narratives can apply to other platform workers beyond riders, we can see contributions that expand those narratives and present new narratives across the special issue. Furthermore, it is essential to highlight that those narratives and other aspects that make social media a virtual environment for platform workers are its design. According to Corbel et al. (2022), digital platforms have the potential to define and shape the ways people develop their practices, resist exploitation, and determine what it is to be a gig worker. Therefore, another important aspect that this special issue touches on is the affordances of the labour platforms and social media platforms.

Social media affordances in platform work cultures

As we have explained in the previous sections, social media has become an integral part of the communicational dynamics for platform workers, as it provides a channel to share their experiences, strategies, and knowledge. Through social media, workers can connect with each other, regardless of their geographical location, and collaborate on tasks. However, social media is not only a tool that enables communication between platform workers, but also an agent that shapes these processes, playing an important role in the constitution of labour cultures. These infrastructures enact material constraints on collective action by defining users’ possibilities (Milan, 2015). In this sense, social media affordances are communicational actors that co-produce meanings and meaningfulness (Bucher and Helmond, 2018).

Social media affordances are generally used to describe what material artefacts allow people to do (Bucher and Helmond, 2018). The concept of affordance originated in the ecological psychology field by Gibson (2015) and later used by design studies (Norman, 1988), has been adapted to different disciplines as a way to generally designate social media features. Considering the more intensive use of this concept to investigate social media, it has been attached to a lack of clear definitions and the losses of relationality that psychological approach might point to (Nagy and Neff, 2015). It also tends to emphasise the power of social media architecture and overlook the user agency (Costa, 2018). In this context, scholars have tried to reframe affordance’s conceptual proposal aiming to reconnect with Gibson’s ecological perspective (Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Costa, 2018; Nagy and Neff, 2015). In other words, it means to conceive affordance as a relational property that can ‘develop a middle ground between technology determinism and social constructivism, and overcome the duality of objects and subjects’ (Costa, 2018: 3650).

In the contemporary platform labour world, social media affordances enact communicational cultures and are enacted by them. Bonini et al. (2023) have shown how workers appropriate of instant messaging apps to deal with the affordances of food delivery apps, which are designed with important constraints to workers’ action possibilities. As app designers establish the possibilities of how workers should do their tasks, ‘couriers are able to “decode” these affordances (Shaw, 2017) by negotiating or subverting their meanings, even to the point of appropriating them for purposes not intended by the designers’ (Bonini et al., 2023: 5). This tactical appropriation of social media to deal with labour platform constraints is a common element alongside platform work studies (Grohmann and Araujo, 2021).

Considering affordances as the material manifestation of the rationalities enacted by platforms, we have to acknowledge them as a situationally dependent property. It means that what they can do is something that is negotiated with users and dependent on cultural environments. As sustain Arriagada and Siles (2023), affordances are not ‘naturally’ or ‘neutrally’ imagined by actors but rather culturally located within technological frames that shape the discourses, values, and practices from which they obtain cultural meaning.

As it is possible to observe, social media affordances are crucial elements that shape and are shaped by the communicational cultures of platform workers. The concept of affordance should be understood as a relational and situational property that is co-produced by users and cultural environments. These affordances play an important role in the constitution of labour cultures and are essential to understanding the contemporary processes of platform work. In many cases, workers appropriate social media to deal with platform constraints, negotiating and subverting their meanings to achieve their goals. Scholars and researchers in this field must pay close attention to the cultural and relational aspects of affordances to fully understand their significance in the platform labour context.

Social media as labour: Creators, media work, and uncertainties

The third stream means social media as platform labour. That is to say, on the one hand, how it specifically affects the cultural production sector, but also how it spreads across various sectors of society. Platformisation, as a process, has affected cultural production in many ways, understood here as sectors of media, communication and culture. Poell et al. (2022) demonstrate that platforms change both institutions and cultural practices, including markets, infrastructure, governance, labour, creativity, and governance. We add that labour can be understood both as a cultural practice – which involves work activities, everyday work – and as institutions, that is, regulatory devices, legal aspects, and political-economic aspects in relation to the market.

In a first dimension, platformisation has reconfigured media work, breaking the boundaries (Deuze and Witschge, 2018) between traditional professions in journalism, advertising, film and movie, public relations, games, among others. As Deuze and Witschge (2018) state, media workers live in a beta version that is permanent. This is not a process that started with the emergence of digital platforms, and therefore it is important to historicise the topic. Over the last few decades, media and cultural workers have faced labour outsourcing and flexibilisation as a norm. Thus, freelance work would not necessarily be a choice, but an imposition dictated by markets in the industry (Cohen, 2012; Grohmann, 2012). This decentralised the role of newsrooms, agencies, and traditional players in the media and cultural industry, providing a broader media ecosystem. In the late 2000s, the so-called ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins, 2006) pointed to changes in transmedia storytelling and consumer culture. However, that was also a period of significant change for those working in these industries. This meant more uncertainties, accumulation of functions, and changes in desired skills, among others (Figaro et al., 2014). To this scenario, we can add the need for each media/creative worker to also be an entrepreneur based on logics such as ‘do it yourself’ (DIY) (Cohen, 2015), transforming media/creative workers into true ‘entreprecariat’ (Lorusso, 2019).

With platformisation, this scenario was accentuated, by the growing dependence of media companies on platform companies (Poell et al., 2022), including funding (Papaevangelou and Smyrnaios, 2023; Poell et al., 2022). On the labour issues, this meant, on the one hand, the diversification and intensification of niches and work activities, on the other hand, the continuity of precarious work (Cohen, 2015; Duffy et al., 2021), which Duffy et al. (2021:2) conceptualise as ‘nasted precarity of creative labour on social media’. This can be summarised from the figure of the creator or social media creator or cultural creator (Cunningham and Craig, 2019). As an update of both celebrity culture and internet celebrity (Abidin, 2021; Khamis et al., 2017) and blogger culture, creators have unpacked in different names (such as influencers), specific positions (such as streamers, e.g. Woodcock and Johnson, 2021; Tran, 2022) and also called from their relationships with platforms (such as Youtubers, Instagrammers, and TikTokers).

Poell et al. (2022) address four dualities around platformised labour in cultural production: visibility versus invisibility, individuality versus collective, job security versus job insecurity, and equality versus inequality. The visibility labour (Abidin, 2016) is a central aspect of social media labour, with the multiplication of labour (Altenried, 2022) often occurring in terms of the intersection between productive and reproductive work (Jarrett, 2022) around social media, including through aspirational labour (Duffy, 2016). Creators receive – especially from platforms – promises of visibility, but face several threats of invisibility in their everyday work. This can occur due to conflicting relationships with platform governance, fears of being blocked or de-platformized (Are, 2023; Duffy and Meisner, 2023), especially creators who are minority people (Persaud and Perks, 2022). Once again, those dualities intersect with social media and cultural production, as a way to position platform workers on one side or another. To a greater or lesser extent, the position of individuals on those dualities is a source of certain uncertainties and insecurities.

Uncertainties and insecurities in creators’ work can show that their platform labour is far from fair or decent work (Graham et al., 2020). Different forms of pressure and uncertainty shape relations with different stakeholders. Concerning platforms, creators try to produce content for the most varied social media platforms, in order not to put all their eggs in one basket (Glatt, 2021). They need to be always up to date with the features and affordances of social media platforms to try to play the visibility labour game (Arriagada and Ibanez, 2020). In the creation of content itself, creators face pressure to continually think and build their self-brand, connect with audiences in a way that seems organic and perform ‘authenticity’ (Shtern et al., 2019). In fact, the performance of authenticity is one of the most streamlined, routinised, and planned production processes by creators and their staff.

The platformisation of labour in cultural production also affected the growing professionalisation of creators and, consequently, the emergence of the creator industry (Hund, 2023; Stoldt et al., 2019). Thus, there are a series of functions, skills, and productive routines behind social media creators. One of the characteristics of this context is the rise of ‘influencer agencies’, specialised in branding and career planning for creators. These agencies contributed to the transformation of the media and creative industries, including employing several former employees of legacy media. They are also an important intermediary for understanding the datafication and quantification of the creator labour, in terms of metrics, measures (Christin and Lewis, 2021). According to Hund (2023) ‘marketing companies create in-house tools to evaluate influencers’ authenticity, credibility, brand safety, etc. These are subjective measures, obviously, that are translated into quantifiable traits’. Thus, being a ‘successful’ creator also means that the potential and reality of their labour are converted into clicks, likes, views, followers, and comments. These conversions – both quantitatively and qualitatively – can result in the so-called social media engagement (Bastos et al., 2021), which is one of the main metrics of creators’ market value.

The ‘mad rush’ for these metrics has led the social media industry to relate to forms of scams and frauds (Grohmann et al., 2022a), especially through click farms (Grohmann et al., 2022b) and follower factories (Lindquist, 2021), mainly present in countries of the Global South, such as Brazil, Philippines, and Indonesia. Click farms are web-based platforms – in general, local companies – where workers, as ‘human bots’, are paid to click, follow, and comment on social media accounts, especially creators (Grohmann, 2022). Grohmann et al. (2022b) found that most click farm customers are small/nano creators. This means that a perverse circuit of platform labour may be taking place, in which creators – in the context of aspirational labour – need a multitude of precarious workers to gain followers as a synonym of credibility and reputation. In addition, there are parallel markets for fake accounts, with buying and selling accounts – and websites where the creator can buy ‘local’ or ‘international’ followers for various platforms, such as TikTok, Kwai, and Instagram. This ‘platform scam’ context (Grohmann et al., 2022a) brings social media labour closer to the disinformation industry (Ong and Cabanes, 2019).

If, on the one hand, creator labour can lead to individualisation of work activities, on the other hand, there are fissures (Ferrari and Graham, 2021) that can be used to circumvent platform rules towards collective efforts. One of them could be engagement pods (O’Meara, 2022), as a ‘weapon of the chics’. According to O’Meara (2022), engagement pods can be understood as forms of cooperative algorithm hacking, professional image management and networks of deliberation and information sharing. According to O’Meara (2022), this means a struggle over measures from mutual aid support, organising and gamification from below. These are forms of agency, voice and collective organisation of creators that can be understood as algorithmic antagonisms (Heemsberg et al., 2022) and forms of everyday resistance in relation to platforms (Siles et al., 2022).

There are also more traditional workers’ collective organising forms, such as unions and cooperatives. Although unions in the culture and media sector are more present in areas such as journalism (Cohen and de Peuter, 2023), the Youtubers Union emerged in Germany (Grohmann, 2020), which focused on defending the rights of YouTube creators. Some of their demands are: monetise everyone, disable the bots, make transparent content decisions, stop demonetisation, and equal treatment for all partners. In 2020, in the United Kingdom, The Creator Union was founded. According to evidence submitted to the British parliament for registration as a union, ‘digital content creators in the UK are a largely female industry and they face a raft of issues including discrimination, unfair pay, contracts and working conditions. TCU [The Creator Union] will campaign for fair conditions [and] offer legal support’ (British Parliament, 2020). They also fight for inclusivity in digital campaigns, as a way to fight for a fairer creator industry. In terms of cooperatives, there are a number of initiatives in the media and culture sectors (de Peuter, 2022; Grohmann, 2020), especially in the areas of audiovisual streaming (Means TV), music (Ampled, Resonate) and games (Motion Twin, Pixel Pushers Union 512). However, in the creator sector, the only one known so far is dedicated to adult creators, Peep.Me, which is considered the first platform cooperative for adult creators.

In addition to the specificities of creator labour and media work, understanding social media as platform labour also has similarities with stream 1 in the sense that social media can be constantly updated in the long history of the ‘social factory’ (Jarrett, 2022). In addition to the tiring debates about free labour that dominated the first half of the 2010s (Bolano and Vieira, 2015; Fuchs, 2014; Jarrett 2015), understanding social media as platform labour means both aspirational work – which is also very feminised (Duffy, 2016) – regarding the spread of the use of social media as a marketplace. This is particularly strong for workers in Global South contexts in the commerce sector, where social media is an update of historical informal work (Grohmann et al., 2022b; Grohmann and Qiu, 2020). During the COVID-19 pandemic, many small businesses were forced to also act on social media, and do business through Instagram or WhatsApp. This meant both a learning experience in the relationship with the platforms and a form of dependence. This is also an example of how platformisation has affected popular commerce in the majority world.

Outline of the contributions to the special issue

This special issue revolves around several overlapping themes that can be approached from the three perspectives proposed above: (1) the role of social media for platform workers: socialisation, solidarity, literacy, and narratives; (2) social media affordances in platform work culture; and (3) social media as labour: creators, media work and uncertainties. It is important to highlight that those perspectives are sometimes intertwined. The following are the most relevant ideas of the 13 articles that make up this special issue, addressed through these perspectives.

Concerning the first perspective, the contribution of Becker et al. (2023) is especially relevant in relation to the analysis of solidarity, specifically by focussing on interactions and informal learning practices that crowdworkers share through Discord. To this extent, Becker et al. (2023) show that social learning practices take place on the Discord server provided by the platform company. On the one hand, there are forms of weak cooperative solidarity among testers, and more extensive and detailed interactions on the moderators side, answering issues or questions in much more detail, adding information sheets or links to complement their answers. Thus, through an online ethnographic study, Becker et al. conclude that solidary bounds are weak precisely because the interactions that take place between testers on Discord are rather functional and practical. Therefore, those interactions are work-related learning practices, focused on resolving doubts and practical questions related to their work.

In contrast, the paper by Bulut and Yeşilyurt (2023) exposes a reality of demands, solidarity, and collective organisation among delivery workers who participated in the strikes at the beginning of 2022 in Turkey. In particular, this contribution emphasises the visibility that networks provide to these precarious realities, which not only integrate the strikes and demonstrations but also integrate and incorporate them into the social imaginary. Thus, the authors baptise social networks as ‘weapons of the gig’, precisely because of the vindicatory and solidarity uses that delivery workers make of them. Social networks are a tool to give visibility to the ordinary but also the extraordinary aspects of their work, from their work routines to their protest actions, allowing them to establish algorithmic resistance and/or facilitate a channel to their (cultural) production of humour and resentment through the networks, among others. Besides offering visibility to their struggles, all of them help establish bonds of solidarity as a collective.

For her part, Reyes (2023) addresses the solidarity networks among indigenous Latin American food delivery workers in New York. Specifically, this study contrasts the uses and flow of information on WhatsApp, as a private messaging channel, and Facebook, as a tool for sharing experiences and information in public. Through ethnographic fieldwork, Reyes (2023) highlights the importance of these channels in the building community of the study group, as well as the formation of social networks. Thus, in line with the articles by Becker et al. and Bulut & Yeşilyurt, the research highlights the complexity of the uses of social networks, but above all the context of these uses and how they can (or cannot) materialise as fundamental tools for the day-to-day life of workers and the formation of their communities.

Concerning socialisation, the work of Pires et al. (2023) analyses the practices of humorous content sharing between Brazilian on-demand drivers in two Facebook groups across. The authors observed across a year different types of stories that are shared and how memes and humorous content are related to on-demand driving and the dimensions of professional identity and negotiation of platform labour conditions. The study demonstrates that humorous content addresses different narratives: the intersection between the drivers, their relationship with the passengers and the platform, and the socio-political context. However, their work also suggests that humour can generate discriminatory work environments, since there are no established workplace ethics or rules. Furthermore, the study reveals narratives that emerge about the clients and the drivers themselves: for example, the good client that tips and gives good ratings or the bad one that constantly uses promos, or the mutual suspicion that drivers and clients can have of each other in a country with high violence rate. In relation to the drivers own narrative, it shows how they sometimes can be counsellors to the clients. Besides, the narrative of a hero also emerges: in some instances, they consider themselves ‘superheroes’ that can defeat any challenge or insecurity and prosper financially. Therefore, the study points out that humour is widely used within these groups to discuss on-demand driving, specially to the negotiation of their professional identity and to deal with precarity.

Similarly, the contribution of Roig and Martorell (2023) points out that a critical consideration of platform work goes beyond discursive forms based purely on verbal communication and can be found also through images, such as memes and editorial cartoons (comic strips). Therefore, the authors have used a combination of qualitative methodologies (manual searches on social media and image collection – memes and editorial cartoons – categorisation and interviews with Spanish cartoonists) to understand the use of visual and humorous material that discuss the rider work in Spain. Across their study they have found how humorous content can represent the riders from different narrative archetypes and social perspectives: superheroes, losers, martyrs, and mean people. Those positions or archetypes also depend on the narrator: clients, themselves of external voices like the creators of editorial images of cartoons. Their results show the presence of different visual forms of representation of riders and their daily routines. These various representations demonstrate the ways platform work is understood by different agents of society. Besides, they noticed a clear difference between memes and cartoons. While the memes are mainly used by riders, customers, or citizens, the cartoons about the rider work align with are usually done by humorists that traditionally open critique of precarious working conditions, and point to the lack of social responsibility of platform companies and their opaque policies.

Israel (2023) contribution explores the intensification of unpaid and unrecognised affective, immaterial, and emotional labour expected from women of colour and historically marginalised media workers due to the convergence of traditional and online media platforms. Using the example of the popular. YouTube channel of Bon Appetit (BA), the author argues that understanding this intensification is crucial to envisioning possibilities for media workers to address exploitative working conditions. Black and Brown women food writers exposed the reality behind BA’s portrayal of a diverse workforce, revealing how intersectional oppressions based on race, gender, class, and sexuality are reinscribed in the labour and technical infrastructures of online platforms. Israel (2023) analyses various texts related to the BA YouTube channel, including metadata, videos, and news coverage of the racial reckoning at Conde Nast and BA, to demonstrate how media convergence and platformisation intensify racialised and gendered inequalities for media workers. However, the article also reveals how these conditions can motivate workers to effect change. Overall, the article highlights the need for greater awareness and action to address the exploitation of marginalised media workers.

With regards to the second viewpoint of the special issue, Bonini et al. (2023) present a discussion about how food delivery workers use private chat groups to supplement the affordances of food delivery apps. Their multi-sited ethnography carried out on in different cities of countries of the Global South and Global North (India, China, Mexico, Spain, and Italy) argues that these chat groups constitute cooperative affordances: the way that food delivery workers restore forms of mutualism not afforded by the food delivery apps. This concept of cooperative affordances aims to capture the cooperative nature of peer-to-peer communication within the informal online chat groups created by the workers themselves. Furthermore, it shows the tactics delivery workers use to avoid the control of the corporations, as these chats offer a place that they can discuss freely. The chat groups function as an informal ‘school’ of food delivery. That is to say, delivery riders create communities of practices, in which they learn to do their job by sharing the same work activity. Moreover, those chats are places to build solidarity, organise collective actions, exchange information, skills, and help each other.

Arriagada and Siles (2023) look at an ambivalent process: how the Chilean influencer industry is shaped by the technological frame by platform affordances and how it provides material support for the temporal and spatial expansion of these technological frames. The authors argue that cultural contexts and platforms’ features mutually constitute each other. Thus, the authors situate the concept of affordances within a broader context in which the features of platforms acquire cultural meanings. The analysis focuses on two key dynamics: firstly, how the Chilean influencer industry is shaped by a ‘technological frame’ that structures the valence of affordances. For instance, in the context of Chilean influencer industry, the authors observed that the negotiations about what it means to be an influencer in Chile, the role of intermediaries, communication with followers, and the global influencer industry are part of this mutually constitutive relationship. Particularly, the study situates discussions about the meaning of being an influencer in Chile, the role of intermediaries such as branding agencies, communication with followers, and the global influencer industry as part of this mutually constitutive relationship.

Regarding the third perspective of the special issue, Pires et al. (2023a) have explored the representation and self-representation of Spanish Riders on YouTube. The authors have used digital methods to mine data and have conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of YouTube videos from different channels published in Spain to identify the main topics that emerge when riders’ work is represented on social media. Instead of finding Youtuber riders that perform expertise and share algorithmic knowledge on YouTube (Chan, 2019; Guerra and D’Andréa, 2022), they have found that few delivery riders transform their work into popular culture in social media, and when they do it is in a transitory manner, sometimes abandoning the channel or changing the thematic of the uploaded videos. Thus, contrasting the optimistic discourses of achieving ‘success’ as content creator on social media platforms. Furthermore, this contribution shows that videos about delivery workers appear in channels that talk about the migration process from lawyers and bloggers that focus on an immigrant community. Thus, demonstrating that being a rider is only a part of the wider process of immigration that include other tasks, such as getting a residency permit, paying taxes, knowing the prices before moving to Spain, among others. Moreover, the results show that immigrants continue to be the people who do delivery rider work in this country, particularly because it serves as an ‘entrance door’. Therefore, being a rider tends to be a common topic in YouTube channels destined for immigrant communities, which tells a lot about the transitory and precarious conditions of this work.

In contrast, Sued and Rodríguez (2023) have found accounts on YouTube and Tiktok in Mexico from riders that became micro-celebrities. Furthermore, in their contribution to the special issue, the authors detected the way Mexican delivery workers construct their identities by negotiating agency with the precarity of their labour context. Also, they scrutinised the narratives that constitute this identity. For doing this work Sued and Rodríguez (2023) implemented critical digital methods to mine data and implemented close and distant reading to analyse it. As a result, they have identified two types of narratives, those of the delivery workers as workers and those as partners of the platforms. The second one prevails among the riders’ content creators, while the first tends to be used more by other actors such as accountants, institutions and the media. On YouTube delivery, workers tend to present themselves as experts and record their videos from a subjective perspective to protect their identity and opinions from harm from the platform companies. While on TikTok, they often post memes and jokes to go viral and get famous. Also, the authors point to the importance of materiality for the identity of delivery riders: the backpack, the motorcycle and the mobile phone, as they connect them to the clients, platform and other organisations. Furthermore, the brand of the delivery app is also essential, as riders constantly mention them in their videos without criticism.

There are other researches more focused on content creators and their labour. Hoose and Rosenbohm (2023) analysed how German creators present themselves and their everyday work as narratives and self-representation, with a specific ‘professional creator narrative’. They pointed out content creation as platform work, as how they use terms of ‘a lot of work’, ‘real work’, and ‘a lot of effort’ to represent their work, building relationships with audiences, sponsors, and platforms. Work, money, profession, and fun are the words most used by creators in their relationship with their activities. Also, there are critical views around self-employed work as content creators, as they see their work as creative activity, and in an independent way.

Nevertheless, content creation is also shaped by imaginaries, including platform imaginaries. Richter and Ye (2023) analyse Instagram creators from Germany, the USA and Japan, and how they negotiate their positions concerning platform features and algorithms. This cross-cultural method allows a nuanced understanding of their working conditions and imaginaries, focussing more on their commonalities. The authors divided the platform imaginaries into three types: Instagram as social space, Instagram as a workplace, and Instagram as marketplace. Thus, the article highlights the interdependencies and situatedness of creators in relation to platform environments. One of the callings for future research involves how the intersectionality of creator identities affects their perceptions of platform imaginaries.

The last article of this section focuses on the relationship between creators and only one platform, specifically Chinese creators and Douyin – the local TikTok, and how is the monetisation process. Huang and Ye (2023) analyse the transaction chain between the platform, advertiser, and creator from the social exchange theory, specifically from the notion of reciprocity. They explain the visibility metrics and how the monetary value is measured, highlighting the role of emotional work between creators and audiences. Douyin uses multiple tools in the way to monetise content. The authors argue that there is a standardisation in the work routines of these creators. This is shaped by what followers, platforms, algorithms and advertisers alike, including empathy and authenticity (followers), pass the censorship (platforms), specific hashtags (algorithms), and specific requirements by the brands. Therefore, with this standardised process, the authors argue that there is no autonomy for platformised cultural production.

Future lines of work beyond the special issue

This collection of articles addresses a fundamental issue that is emerging strongly in different parts of the world: platform work and social media. In the current context of hyperconnectivity and capitalism, the joint approach to these two issues highlights different questions. Firstly, it highlights that, like any political and social issue, the uses of social media in platform work are closely related to the social, economic, political and cultural contexts in which they occur. In this sense, the practices that platform workers carry out are the origin of a complex intermingling of possibilities, from vindicatory practices and the visibility of precarious realities to functional learning practices of a practical and working nature.

Secondly, the methodological approach of the studies presented in this compilation of articles also exemplifies the importance of multi-method perspectives and their complementarity in studies of the exact nature and subject matter. Finally, the contrast of results and the diversity of conclusions enrich the scientific contribution and, in turn, broadens the field of study. In short, new fields of study are opened in relation to the algorithmic complexity behind platform work and its uses in the control of workers and, in turn, the workers’ strategies in the face of measures that transcend the human.

Thirdly, this special issue also opens the line to investigate the use of visual humour, memes and narratives among platform workers to face and cope with their reality, as well as a way to understand platform work from different points of view with the use of images that can be easily reproduced and are part of popular culture. Given this, we appeal to continue contributing and expanding the field of study, considering the structural inequalities and the emerging complexity of the social, political, economic, cultural, and visual processes behind this phenomenon.

Definitely, we open new questions and topics to broadly discuss this special issue, addressing perspectives and results that make evident the emerging importance of platform work, together with its relationship – which we can consider inherent – with social media and the cultural production that derives from it.