Platforms on Trial. Mapping connections between social media platforms and societal harms during the Facebook files/papers controversy.

Social media platforms are at the centre of significant debate in our contemporary digital societies (Bucher, 2018; Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013; Marres, 2017). Scandals in the tech industry over the last decade have sparked a widespread backlash against Big Tech (Albris et al., 2024). Controversies over interface designs, algorithms, and metrics of social media platforms, have put into question how they measure and intervene in our social interactions and their consequences to mental health, democracy, and society. Data leaks, whistleblowers, misinformation campaigns, and election interference, and social experiments have drawn attention to the so-called toxic and unaccountable power of these platforms and the broader crisis of accountability in digital societies (Cooper et al., 2022; Khan, 2018; Marres, 2021; Suarez Estrada et al., 2022; Van Dijck et al., 2018).
This research investigates the denunciation of platform harms and the demand to hold platforms accountable. From a theoretical framework informed by pragmatist and dramaturgical perspectives, rather than treating platform harms as either objective conditions inherent to static technologies nor subjective definitions by individual humans, we must look at the situations where these platforms as stages for social interactions, are put on stage and called to account for their configurations and designs. Instead of attempting to prove platforms' harmful or toxic effects, this research aims to think about how the connections between platforms and harms are made and unmade in the first place. Making and not making these connections are practical accomplishments that engages and articulates multiple actors to distribute accountability relations.
Situated at the interdisciplinary intersection of Digital Sociology, Media Studies, and Science and Technology Studies (STS), this research inquiry into how actors make and unmake connections between social media platforms and societal harms across settings, in order to contribute a better understanding of how platforms are put on trial. To address this question, I am mapping a specific platform controversy: the Facebook Files/Papers, a disclosure of Meta's internal research by former employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021 (Hendrix, 2021; Horwitz, 2021). The leaked documents would circulate across media, governments, courts and advocacy groups, to demonstrate Meta's awareness of the harmful impact of platforms on issues like teen mental health, election integrity, Covid-19 misinformation and vaccination hesitancy, hate speech and human trafficking, among many other issues. In response, Meta's leadership argued the internal research was misinterpreted in a coordinated effort to paint a false picture of the company.
The project traces how Meta's platforms were put on trial during this controversy, focusing on following the disclosure across different media settings. In this controversy mapping, I combine digital methods with ethnographic methods in a mixed-methods design, which provides a distinctive contribution to digital sociology (Marres, 2015; Rogers, 2019; Venturini & Munk, 2022; Venturini & Rogers, 2019). Digital trace data collected through web scraping and API requests, are interwoven with semi-structured interviews with experts and key actors in the controversy, participant observation of relevant events, as well as a document analysis (Asdal & Reinertsen, 2022) of the leaked documents, in a kind of digitally connective fieldwork. Through the mapping, this research project provides a unique perspective on how platform controversies unfold, how connections between platforms and societal harms are made and unmade, and how responsibilities are distributed across various actors, and settings. Ultimately, the study will offer a deeper understanding of platform accountability in contemporary societies.