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This introductory chapter is a brief overview on craigslist and its impact on digital culture. Most people think of craigslist as a simple-looking site with a few basic functions, but in terms of the platform's value to digital culture, craigslist is both popular and multifaceted. Craigslist is the nineteenth most visited website in the United States, and hosts tens of thousands of exchanges every day. Craigslist is at once a marketplace, a job hub, and a message board. To cover the complexity of such a platform, this chapter also presents the book's approach to telling the story of craigslist: through a discussion of craigslist's historical and legal context, user accounts of everyday successes and failures, and by thinking about craigslist's design and policies.

The role of online intermediaries has changed since the adoption of the e-Commerce Directive in 2000. The implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in online content management has challenged the original passive role of online service providers in relation to third-party content. As a result, the EU strategy has shifted from a liberal approach to ensure the development of new digital services without overwhelming ISPs of monitoring and removal obligations to the regulation of online content management activities. The threats for fundamental rights deriving from opaque decision-making processes of online content have overcome the traditional narrative of ISPs’ freedom to conduct their business. The result of this process has led to a new regulatory phase within the framework of the Digital Single Market strategy.

This chapter analyzes the negotiation between the desire to be public and the limits and possibilities of social media, exploring the relationship between publics and platforms that plays out on a very unstable ground. It highlights the constraints that the architecture of online platforms imposes on its users' ability to exploit them for one's purposes. It also addresses the question of how or whether social media users can exercise agency independently of the restrictive design of such platforms. The chapter discusses the desire to vie for the eyes and ears of followers online, losing sight of how much time is spent feeding an attention economy that can easily turn utopian expectations about networked activism into dystopian fears of subjugation and submission to surveillance capitalism. It features utopian ambitions that defined the internet as it grew and revolved heavily around virtuality, noting the possibility of escape from the mundane constraints of the physical world and the promise of a better world.

This chapter offers a sociology of platforms that is aimed at making them 'public' through the way that they are used. It highlights how exciting social media are as objects of and tools for sociological research and thinking, emphasizing cautiousness about the limits that the political economy imposes. It also looks at the realization that online platforms are not neutral, idle tools as they can be used whenever or however and are still dictated by powerful systems on how much that can be done with and through them. The chapter analyzes the idea of platform capitalism, analysing the function of social media as promising opportunities for connection, exchange and collaboration. It highlights ways that obscure the reality that social media is used as much as individuals are being used by them.

This chapter provides an overview of quantitative comparative evidence on Internet and platform work in Europe. It shows that many have had experience of Internet and platform work, but only a small group engages in this work on a regular basis. Very low-income levels are a likely reason for this attrition and explain why the majority of these workers are also employed in the offline labor market. Activities performed by online workers usually require basic skills, even though the workers performing them tend to be better educated than the general population. Low incomes and a lack of standard employment put online work in the category of precarious employment. The vulnerability of online workers is aggravated by the fact that their offline jobs also tend to be nonstandard, based on freelancing or temporary contracts, while their work trajectories are more fragmented.

In the last couple of years, the dissemination of false content online has raised serious concerns worldwide. As a result, states have attempted to tackle disinformation in different ways. Regulating disinformation requires solving the following dilemma: How and to what extent can we regulate (false) speech? It is not by chance that democratic and authoritarian countries have followed different regulatory paths in this field. The social media landscape have contributed to increasing the complexity in the fight against disinformation. The pandemic has then amplified the challenges coming from the spread of false content. This work aims to outline anti-disinformation trends in Europe. By focusing on Europe as one of the most interesting areas of the world to analyse regulatory attempts concerning disinformation, the primary goal of this work is to provide a nuanced approach in this field, going beyond the mere description of supranational and legislative regulation and looking at the European regulatory framework under a multilevel constitutional perspective.

This chapter surveys social media platforms whose policies are examined in this book and gives an overview of critical research on the increasing role of private intermediaries in regulating digital environments (DeNardis, 2014), placing this information against the safe harbor provisions of the CDA and DMCA, which ensure limited liability for online intermediaries. The brief company profiles are meant to provide an overview for those readers who are not familiar with these companies and their history in relationship to bullying incidents. Following Gillespie (2010, 2015) and van Dijck (2013), the chapter examines the literature on discourses of platforms.

The case study presented in this chapter discusses the design and implementation of an online platform, “come_NET,” in the context of intercultural computer clubs in Germany. This tool was built in close cooperation with the children and adult computer club participants. It was designed to foster the sharing of ideas and experiences across distances, support collaboration, and make skills and expertise accessible to others in the local neighborhood contexts. In particular, the participatory-design process involving the children in the computer clubs fostered a profound understanding of the platform structure and functionalities. The study results show how younger children in particular were able to benefit, as the closed nature of the platform enabled them to gather experience as users of social media, but in a safe and controlled environment.

The introduction puts forward the notion of the “platform society,” which emphasizes the inextricable relation between online platforms and societal structures. It refers to a society in which social and economic traffic is increasingly channeled by a (corporate) global online platform ecosystem that is driven by algorithms and fueled by data. In turn, an online platform should be understood as a programmable digital architecture designed to organize interactions between users—not just end users but also corporate entities and public bodies. It is geared toward the systematic collection, algorithmic processing, circulation, and monetization of user data. Crucially, platforms cannot be seen apart from each other but evolve in the context of an online setting that is structured by its own logic.

The Buddhist Geeks project is an online Buddhist media platform launched in 2007 by two self-identified millennials who wanted to combine their passion for Buddhism with their “geeky skills.” It quickly gained a wide audience for its pioneering explorations into the convergence of Buddhism, technology, and global culture. Through an analysis of the Buddhist Geeks project and a consideration of its replacement, Meditate.io., this chapter explores the impact of technology and digital culture on American convert Buddhism. It draws on discourse analysis, formal interviews with some of the main players of the Buddhist Geeks project, informal interaction with multiple Buddhist Geeks participants, and participant observation at three annual Buddhist Geeks conferences from 2012 to 2015.

This chapter deals with indexing. Indexing is typically engaged in by internet service providers of different kinds, such as search engines, content aggregators, and online content sharing platforms, including social media. Indexing is the background process that tries to achieve greater accessibility of the content on the internet. However, this process may engage the right of reproduction and the right of communication to the public, and therefore, must be considered separately. Based on the indexing capabilities and to facilitate deeper analysis, this chapter classifies the providers into search engines, content sharing platforms, news aggregators and other content aggregators. The chapter explains how courts have tried to deal with this issue and argues for a greater role of implied licences to address the issues of copyright infringement. While indexing of content that is placed on the internet by or with the copyright owner’s consent can benefit from consent-based implied licence, indexing of the content that is placed on the internet without the copyright owner’s consent may benefit from a policy-based implied licence, saving them from liability for indexing infringing content under certain circumstances.

This chapter cites the perils of perfection feminism. Writing on Glass is an online media platform aiming to make the feminist theory more accessible, then, later on, helping other women build businesses. The platform tried to void corporate feminism wherein products and services to women were not benefiting women's rights. However, in late 2018, the business imploded alongside Feminist Incubator as the owner became reliant on male clients and his fiance's income after serving numerous people for little money. According to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the pursuit of perfection is immature as it is the extreme idea of purity within feminism. The passion for feminism is largely in line with resilience than perfection.

The entrance of intimate embodied experiences, illness and dying into the digital sphere foregrounds questions of boundaries (how far to go with public self-representation online) and genre (are social media trivialising illness experiences?) The Afterword offers a snapshot of the new media landscape of illness narratives that has developed in the so-called decade of Health 2.0, or ‘participatory healthcare’, and draws connections between the ethical, narratological and political questions for both authors and readers raised by these forms and those discussed in the book’s previous chapters. Focusing on their distinctly public nature, immediacy and interactivity, it provides some final reflections on what online and collaborative platforms, and social media like Facebook and Twitter, add to understandings of visibility, treatment and recovery, as well as to the intimate processes of witnessing and collaboration examined in the book’s preceding chapters.