The Politics of Engagement in Platform Governance

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of user engagement has dominated debate over the governance of online platforms, and critics use the term to assign crass commercial interests to social media companies. We argue that social media engagement is a multifaceted ideal that serves both economic and ideological functions for platforms. We show how Facebook’s early leadership used the concept to reconcile the competing demands of expansion, revenue generation, and community-building. In doing so, they synthesized three distinct ideas: the Silicon Valley belief that network expansion correlated with network strength, the ad industry’s contention that media should promote emotional investment from viewers, and the academic claim that civic participation is the most important democratic virtue. Even as the contradictions that these claims yield have come to the foreground, the multiple logics of engagement have proven difficult to evade, and it continues to shape discussions of platform governance.