Platforms & Society

Questions regarding the quality of online platform data have gained significant attention and research focus in recent years. Inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent data are some of the many examples of data quality problems. At the same time, digital platforms have restricted access to their data in recent years. This strategy by digital platforms has now increasingly become the subject of political efforts of regulation, especially the Digital Services Act (DSA) of the European Union. Therefore, we argue that the quality of online platform data cannot solely be understood as a methodological, internal research construct but also as a contested concept in which various actors from politics, the tech industry, and academia negotiate and represent specific interests. To assess the role of data quality in and around the DSA, we analyze the content of the DSA itself, in particular Art. 40 and the respective Delegated Regulation (DR), as well as the feedback submitted to the European Commission's Call for Evidence and the Delegated Regulation draft. We then apply quantitative content analysis, multiple correspondence analysis, and thematic analysis. Results indicate that data quality plays little to no role in the official EU documents, namely, the DSA and the Delegated Regulation draft. In the public feedback, however, data quality concerns have been raised by various stakeholders in academia. Based on the results, we argue that data quality should play a more prominent role in the debate to fulfill the DSA aims of assessing systemic risks in the EU.

This article examines how Latin American third-party sellers on Mercado Libre—the region's largest e-commerce platform—internalize and manage risk through practices aligned with Neff's (2012) concept of venture labor. Drawing on 17 in-depth interviews with sellers based in Chile, we explore how individuals navigate economic precarity and algorithmic uncertainty by mobilizing specific strategies and resources. We identify three risk management strategies: financial, creative, and actuarial. The financial strategy frames platform work as an investment for achieving economic independence; the creative strategy emphasizes personal reinvention, branding, and visibility; and the actuarial strategy involves anticipating trends and ensuring long-term business viability. These strategies are shaped by platform-specific conditions. Sellers view Mercado Libre as safer and more legitimate than alternatives like Facebook Marketplace, offering formalized transactions and greater visibility—yet also requiring constant adaptation to opaque algorithms and performance metrics. To support these strategies, sellers draw on a mix of formal and informal resources. These include official training programs, YouTube tutorials, peer learning networks, and relationships with intermediaries. Networking—both online and in person—emerges as a key resource, helping sellers exchange knowledge, gain visibility, and mitigate uncertainty. This article makes three contributions to platform labor research. First, it updates the concept of venture labor by highlighting how algorithmic infrastructures shape risk-taking. Second, it shows how risk is being redefined in post-pandemic Latin America. Third, it situates venture labor in the Global South, emphasizing the cultural and institutional specificities that shape entrepreneurial labor on digital platforms like Mercado Libre.

This paper examines the use of TikTok by female Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers as a tool for digital militarism and image warfare. Following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, there was a surge in IDF soldiers posting ‘thirst trap’ videos, blending dance, seduction, and militarized imagery to humanize soldiers and amplify state narratives. Analysing 200 accounts and 500 videos, the study identifies a spectrum of different seduction strategies ranging from ‘cute’ soft power dynamics to the dramatization of eroticized brutality. The low-tier content features playful, non-militant aesthetics, while middle-tier content incorporates weapons and military settings to recontextualize platform trends and high-tier content involves explicit self-sexualization and provocative imagery. These videos exploit TikTok’s participatory affordances and algorithmic visibility to maximise engagement while trivialising violence across varying intensities. The paper further identifies a semi-automated computational propaganda campaign that repurposes authentic IDF content through personalised overlays to engage audiences, producing forms of participatory militainment. In doing so, these strategies collapse distinctions between the personal and the political, recasting propaganda as entertainment. The study underscores the urgent need for critical media literacy to understand how platform infrastructures actively shape conflict narratives in the era of post-digital warfare.

This article examines how, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has adapted its digital diplomacy strategy to promote anti-Western narratives for global audiences. Drawing on data from Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram, we analyze the circulation and mutation of a “counter-hegemonic” narrative across distinct platform infrastructures. We focus on how motifs such as the “Golden Billion” condense geopolitical grievances into a flexible symbolic repertoire that aligns with broader critiques of liberal internationalism. Combining critical engagement metrics with discourse analysis, we show how these narratives gain traction not simply through content but through infrastructural attunement and affective resonance. We propose the concept of ambient parapolitics to capture how strategic narratives are embedded in the communicative logic of platforms—circulating less through persuasion than through participatory cues and symbolic compression. The article contributes to debates on platform governance, strategic narrative, and the infrastructures of geopolitical influence.

Social media platforms evolve rapidly. While platform studies have often analyzed specific policy or feature changes, there remains a lack of shared language to conceptualize how platforms themselves represent such changes. In this article, we analyze public communications from Meta, YouTube, X, and TikTok to examine how platforms construct and justify change. We explicate platform evolution as a technical but also deeply discursive process. Platforms frame their transformations in interesting ways, especially if these shifts consolidate power or deepen user dependence. We introduce the concept of changecraft: the strategic discursive practices through which platforms manage, legitimize, and normalize change. Changecraft encompasses the rendering of infrastructural shifts as visible, the framing of ideological pivots as continuity, and the deployment of patchworked updates to subtly reorient platform futures. This framework provides scholars a way to interrogate platform change not just by what changes but by how platforms seek to make change meaningful and acceptable to their publics.

Despite significant interest in the influence of digital platforms, we still lack a theoretically grounded understanding of why platformization processes and outcomes differ across contexts. In this article, we address this gap by developing a field-theoretical framework that conceptualizes platformization as a field-level transformation process shaped by the structural conditions of strategic action fields (SAFs), including actor constellations, patterns of interaction and mutual awareness, and shared understandings about purposes, power relations, and rules. Empirically, we present a comparative analysis of platformization processes in three business fields – logistics, mechanical component manufacturing, and orthopaedic technology – drawing on 89 interviews, survey data, and ethnographic materials. Our findings show that platformization is limited by the specific structural conditions of business fields. These include the organizational complexity and heterogeneity of user firms that curtail standardized solutions, the long-standing relational networks that reduce intermediation opportunities, the importance of domain-specific experiential knowledge that platforms struggle to replicate, the strong bargaining position of users and complementors, and the complexity of formal and informal regulation. These conditions result in distinct platformization processes that diverge from the ‘winner-takes-all’ dynamics observed in consumer-facing fields. Instead of platform dominance, based on strong network and lock-in effects, we identify outcomes such as marginal and partial platformization and even platform shutout. Platforms remain confined to niche segments, coexist with incumbents, or are absorbed into existing structures. Overall, the article contributes to platform studies by shifting the analytical focus from platform-centric explanations to the broader socioeconomic contexts in which platforms are embedded. It highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of platformization that accounts for variation across fields and challenges generic claims about the dominance of platform organizations across society.

Mobile games are released through crowded app store platforms where competition is intense, and discoverability is a critical problem. In this environment, attracting new users is increasingly driven by advertising. This article examines one prominent format: playable ads, interactive advertisements embedded within mobile games. This article reports on a study of 100 unique playables collected from iOS games, analysing their characteristics, content and interface design. We show how circulation, understood as the movement of users between apps, is structured through the temporal and affective techniques of playable ad design, often in ethically problematic ways, while also conditioned by broader industrial dynamics such as the heavy ad spending of large game app developers and publishers. We argue that the ability to circulate constitutes a form of circulation power and that discoverability in digital games is fundamentally tied to this capacity.

The Covid-19 pandemic constituted a critical juncture that opened a window of opportunity for digital platforms to experiment with socially, economically and environmentally oriented forms of innovation. Across sectors such as tourism, food and local logistics, alternative initiatives sought to develop sustainable counter-models to dominant corporate e-commerce systems. However, the post-pandemic return to established consumption patterns rapidly exposed the difficulties these experiments face in achieving a durable, transformative impact. This paper examines INDACO, a digital platform developed in Trentino during the pandemic, to analyse how temporality, scaling challenges and structural constraints shape the capacity of alternative digital platforms to realise their ecosocial objectives. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research and the multi-level perspective, we show how temporal frictions, coordination barriers and competitive pressures from incumbent platforms combined to produce a trajectory of mission drift and limited territorial embedding. By foregrounding the role of temporality in socio-technical transitions, this study contributes to debates on emergent social innovation, alternative organising and the structural limits faced by digital platforms seeking to contest entrenched economic regimes.

This short piece examines how generative AI is becoming embedded in far-right propaganda ecosystems, drawing on examples from the 2023 Dublin riots and the 2024 Southport unrest. Using a media experiment, it traces a re-generative pipeline in which extremist images collected from Telegram and X are first converted into text prompts and then re-created through commercial image models. The results suggest that AI systems do not simply neutralize hateful content: they often sanitize its most explicit markers while preserving, displacing or rearticulating underlying ideological bias. The article argues that this affinity between far-right visual culture and generative AI is not accidental, but rooted in the biases and aesthetic logics built into contemporary commercial models.

Existing scholarship often employs metaphors that depict platforms as fixed, bounded spaces. This paper introduces the concept of ‘liquid platforms’, inspired by the metaphor of liquidity, to critically examine the fluid, layered and contested nature of contemporary digital economies. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with non-fungible token collectors and industry leaders based in Hong Kong, I demonstrate how these actors enact a form of ‘makeshift decentralisation’ through the manipulation of fluid platform boundaries, labour-intensive ‘grinding’ practices and visualisation tools, all aimed at imbuing non-fungible tokens with liquidity. Despite these efforts to manufacture price stability, platforms remain susceptible to structural liquidity corrections. The analysis highlights the increasingly important role that platforms – both as infrastructural and sociotechnical systems – play in generating liquidity. The ‘liquid platform’ metaphor offers a valuable framework for understanding the ever more complex, unstable dynamics that shape modern digital economies.

Risk is often an implicit theme in platform studies and is rarely made explicit in the analysis of platform power. The increased dependencies created by digital platforms and imposed on their complementors—the firms that provide the goods and services that attract users to digital platform ecosystems—can make risk harder to discern. Complementors like the game publisher Playtika that specialize in socially marginal commodities, like free-to-play gambling apps, make for a salient case study in how risk is built directly into the platform-complementor relationship. We use institutional analysis to conduct a close reading of Playtika's risk reporting in its financial disclosure documentation (e.g., annual reports) and investor relations communications, uncovering three distinct categories: financial risk, infrastructural risk, and regulatory risk. Taken together, this collection of institutional risks speaks to how platform governance places constraints on Playtika's business operations. We argue that risk is built directly into the complex operationalization of platform power, thus making it imperative to outline explicitly how it is differentiated between platforms and their complementors. Ultimately, we position Playtika's work to overcome institutional risks as representative of the volatile and asymmetrical power relations that shape the wider platform economy.

Telegram is a social media and messaging platform known for its hands-off approach to content moderation. This makes it both a popular ‘mainstream’ platform and an attractive medium for discourse less welcome on other platforms, such as those of politically extreme actors. Additionally, owing to its anonymity and prominence in Eastern Europe, it has been linked to campaigns of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), particularly by Russian state actors. The objective of the present paper is to investigate how Telegram, through both user-curated and algorithmic recommendations, facilitates connections between channels pertaining to mainstream electoral politics and those propagating fringe political discourses. To this end, we analyse the Telegram environment surrounding the channels of two far-right political parties from the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively: Forum voor Democratie (‘FVDNL’) and Vlaams Belang (‘vlbelang’). We specifically propose a comparative, ‘centrifugal’ reading of these channels, in which we trace outgoing connections to map the broader issue space to which they connect. On a methodological level, we argue that an analysis of the dataset based on outgoing links represented by forwarded messages – a popular method in Telegram research – is insufficient for a comprehensive understanding of this issue space and propose an approach centred around Telegram's new ‘similar channels’ feature. This under-researched algorithmic mode of amplification is to some extent based on shared audiences between channels, but the actual inner workings of this recommender engine remain largely opaque. Tracing these connections, we observe that both political seed channels exist in a context in which far-right, identitarian and conspiratorial discourse predominates. Moreover, channels concerned with geopolitical current events that propagate a pro-Russian narrative are present. We thereby conclude that Telegram's ‘similar channels’ feature affords new methodological opportunities that can enrich Telegram case studies by providing access to the platform's ‘ambient’ modes of amplification.

In this special issue, we begin to investigate transaction platforms as vital organs in the bodily constitution of digital economies. In grounding this approach, our introductory article introduces different classes of transaction platforms that serve as functional interchanges for the complex transaction chains engendered within network economies. While this categorical analysis aims to be globally applicable, our exemplars are rooted in our respective research in Asia - the region demonstrating the strongest and swiftest transition to digital transactions, reflecting its more-mobile tendencies, digital majority, distinctive transactional cultures, competitive and cooperative investments in digital futures. Because context matters, we infer that digital transactions are not only the nerves and veins of algorithmic capitalism, but also symptomatic of emergent transactional cultures, each arising with their own material histories and aspirations, social and semantic ontologies.

This article introduces the concept of predatory communities – communities engineered for value extraction within the platform economy. In contrast to conventional understandings of online communities as emergent social formations, we examine how individuals and organizations can exploit specific mechanisms to scaffold and facilitate community sentiments and commodification through predatory strategies. Grounded in a synthesis of sociological literature, internet studies, and platform scholarship, we define predatory communities and use three case studies involving social media influencers and finance-related platforms to illustrate the deployment of three predatory strategies: predatory inclusion, obfuscated brokerage relationships, and turning prey into predators through recruitment. The article explores the inherent contradictions between the affective dimensions of community membership and the economic imperatives driving predatory practices, analysing how individuals and organizations exploit platform infrastructures to construct and maintain predatory communities. We argue for a critical interrogation of the community concept, its related mechanisms, and the values and interests embedded within platformized communities.

Dating apps can facilitate friendships, relationships, and other connections, but they can also be sites of risk, harm, and violence. While platform policies and associated documents outline duties and protections offered to users, platform governance can embed carceral forms of justice enacted through surveillance and punishment. Through a comparative study of 30 dating apps’ safety materials, we identified three themes reflecting carceral logic in dating app governance: individualization of user safety; policing through peer moderation and reliance on law enforcement; and surveillance-based features encouraging users to exchange their data for perceived protection. These approaches frame harm as an individual failure, ignore systemic violence, promote punitive responses to justice, and risk exacerbating users’ vulnerability to privacy violations. We recommend that dating apps adopt alternative models of justice centered on users’ existing safety strategies, mutual accountability and responsibility, and build in mechanisms that afford transparency and user autonomy in choosing safety mechanisms that can be adapted according to the differential risks users face.

Digital labour platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Deliveroo, and Uber concentrate large volumes of socially relevant data while severely limiting independent research access, creating deep asymmetries in what can be empirically known about their operations. This paper provides the first systematic analysis of how these asymmetries shape academic knowledge production, drawing on 397 empirical studies of 57 labour platforms operating in Europe. We show that only 7% of studies rely on platform-provided data and that these are disproportionately concentrated on topics aligned with platform interests, such as sustainability and consumer welfare, while contentious issues such as labour rights, earnings, discrimination, and safety are overwhelmingly studied using user-reported or scraped data. We conceptualise this pattern as epistemic selectivity: a structural dynamic through which platform-controlled data environments selectively enable some research agendas while constraining others. The study advances current debates on business-to-science data asymmetry and platform observability by showing that platforms shape the contours of public interest knowledge itself and highlights the need for regulatory frameworks that ensure more equitable and accountable data access.

This article examines fintech platforms’ strategies of development and growth through an analysis of the Philippines’ finance super app, GCash, home to over 90 million registered users and crucial in a country where poor rural infrastructure, weak institutions, and perceived barriers to financial account ownership have led to historically low financial inclusion. Drawing from a platform biography of GCash's development, alongside a walkthrough of its super app form, the study examines GCash as a platform, super app, and megacorp, tracing how GCash evolved from its SMS remittance-based foundations into a sprawling constellation of services. GCash not only extends access to financial services but also structures transactions and shapes the cultural and economic conditions of everyday exchange. We argue that GCash operates simultaneously as a catalog of digital transactions—revealing the interconnections among markets, persons, and technology—and as a financial infrastructure whose reach is structured by corporate conglomerates, state support, global capital, and digital architectures. These highlight the tensions at the heart of GCash: its promise of “finance for all” is entangled with its embedding in a megacorp and its reliance on partnerships with global capital. By foregrounding these tensions, the article situates GCash within broader dynamics of the super-appification of finance, underscoring how platform-led financial inclusion efforts are bound up with the consolidation of corporate power and the governance challenges of financialization in contexts of infrastructural weakness and economic precarity.

Platforms like WhatsApp form the backbone for everyday communication in the majority world. Extensive scholarship has focused on WhatsApp's role in the spread of mis- and disinformation and on WhatsApp being repurposed for use in educational, gig work, and healthcare settings. And while much of this platform scholarship has examined contexts in which users receive and access information, researchers have yet to pay attention to users’ personal information practices such as receiving, storing, and sharing files like images, videos, and PDFs. Based on an interview and task-based study focused on files and managing personal information (N = 25), we present findings that show WhatsApp—as a platform and superapp—is a key site for link sharing between apps, how WhatsApp's affordances impact users’ perceptions of files, and how superapps shape personal information practices with mobile devices. We discuss the implications of these findings for platform studies research, arguing that platform studies scholars should expand the scope of their studies from top-down governance of data management and information transmission to bottom-up everyday information practices of mobile-first users impacted by platforms.

This article develops a new history of gig work by turning to the margins of standard histories of capitalism. In contrast to prior research, which has used historical analogies to describe the contemporary gig economy, we develop a genealogy of three organizational forms that have sponsored entrepreneurship in the United States since the early twentieth century: multi-level marking organizations, franchises, and platforms. We analyze how all three organizational forms have restructured work by appealing to individuals, communities, and states, promising solutions to forms of marginalization and exclusion that existing employment laws and norms created. However, we find that sponsored entrepreneurship tends to perpetuate and even exacerbate the inequalities that it purports to remedy.

This paper introduces the concept of the silicon gaze to explain how large language models (LLMs) reproduce and amplify long-standing spatial inequalities. Drawing on a 20.3-million-query audit of ChatGPT, we map systematic biases in the model's representations of countries, states, cities, and neighbourhoods. From these empirics, we argue that bias is not a correctable anomaly but an intrinsic feature of generative AI, rooted in historically uneven data ecologies and design choices. Building on a power-aware, relational approach, we develop a five-part typology of bias (availability, pattern, averaging, trope, and proxy) that accounts for the complex ways in which LLMs privilege certain places while rendering others invisible.

Human resource platforms organize how workers participate in and experience work as informationalized relations and routines. The Workhuman Cloud, developed by a human resource tech firm, exemplifies how platforms and the organizations that use them work to engineer disciplined subjects. Platform studies scholars have shown processes of platformization reaching business management, labor and industrial relations, law and policy, and more. This article analyzes corporate plans and tech demonstrations for the Workhuman Cloud and industry expert reports promoting how to “make work more human.” What does it mean when platforms are enrolled to enact users as “human”? What kind of human do they constitute? We interrogate how actors deploy care and platforms in the differential management of workers. Incorporating people analytics, ideas about social recognition, gamification, and the automation of inclusion, the Workhuman Cloud is an expression of what we call “cruel optimization.” This concept names how platforms configure the persistent attachment to the belief that improving oneself through sociotechnical arrangements (i.e., algorithmic control, recognition, and rewards) instills a virtuous cycle of betterment even when such attachment works against one's well-being. Drawing from feminist and critical race STS, we scrutinize how the technopolitics of user configurations in contemporary work platforms ensconce surveillance and labor governance through the non-innocence of care.

Social media platforms serve as critical gatekeepers in democratic information ecosystems, yet the mechanisms governing political content amplification remain poorly understood. This study examines how Facebook amplifies news by analysing 130,448 highly circulated URLs shared between 2017 and 2022, using Meta's Privacy-Protected Full URLs Dataset. We investigate how user-driven sharing translates into viewership and how audience partisan alignment, source credibility and algorithmic evolution moderate this relationship. Our analysis yields three key findings. First, although sharing reliably predicts viewing, this relationship weakens significantly for content with intensely partisan audiences, even after controlling for engagement levels. Second, adherence to professional journalistic standards independently increases reach – sources with higher credibility scores receive substantially more views than those with lower scores, holding shares constant. Third, and most critically, temporal analysis reveals that these effects are algorithmically modulated rather than structurally fixed. During Facebook’s 2020 election ‘break the glass’ interventions, the partisan penalty doubled while rewards for quality journalism surged simultaneously. These volatile coefficients provide compelling evidence that reduced reach for partisan content stems from active platform intervention, not organic network limitations. Our findings demonstrate that Facebook operates as an active curator, not a neutral conduit. Its algorithmic choices create measurable disparities in content visibility that profoundly shape democratic discourse. As algorithmic curation increasingly determines citizens’ information exposure, the temporal instability of these effects underscores the urgent need for platform transparency and accountability in democratic governance.

On the one hand, affect drives people to post, like, share, and engage on social media so that affect is key to the circuits of monetisation. On the other hand, affect does not necessarily map onto clearly identifiable emotions, being rather an issue of immediately felt, and possibly conflicting intensities. For their part, memes involve a fair share of ambiguity in how they are shared and interpreted and the shapes that their variations take. Zooming in on this unpredictability, this text addresses ambiguity as less of a problem than as an analytically productive lens into studies of memetic circulation across platforms.

Through a survey amongst 100 users who post pole dancing content, this study evaluates the efficacy of Instagram's Account Status tools for the transparency and appeal of shadowbanning. Instagram's 2023 Account Status update appeared, on paper, to be a revolution for shadowbanned users: finally, after having to guess if they were shadowbanned since 2019, users could check if their content and profile violated Instagram's newly published Recommendation Guidelines, making it ineligible for recommendations on the Explore page and to non-followers. However, this paper's findings show that pole dancers – a demographic greatly affected by algorithmic precarity in the creator economy, crucial in providing some of the first examples of shadowbanning – found Account Status tools to be ineffective and discriminatory. Users surveyed found that the update merely informs them of violations’ detections, falling short of educating them about improving posting behaviour and of providing significant redress mechanisms. As such, this paper finds Account Status to be an exercise in performative transparency, a corporate box-ticking exercise engaging with a form of disclosure surrounding governance decisions that only serves the purpose of dodging opacity accusations without meaningfully engaging in communications about governance.

As social media platforms age, change and become inaccessible through their proprietary interfaces, web archives emerge as one way through which social media data can continue to be accessed, analysed and studied. Over the past 30 years of activity, many archivists and academics have written about the compounding challenges to accessing and preserving constantly changing – and ephemeral – digital material. As the web has shifted from websites to platforms, archiving initiatives and institutions have followed, attempting to keep up with changes to dynamic formats and content. In academic work on archives, the question of how to continuously access, and provide continuous access to, social media data and platforms is often addressed. What is less often addressed are the temporal politics embedded in these archival practices. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of four dominant modes of archiving: crawls, streams, rescues and documentation, that together represent the main mechanisms through which platformed data is extracted. I argue that by examining not just how archives are made, but when, we can unveil the temporal politics of archiving platformed community and the subsequent production of platform(ed) archives. In particular, this paper demonstrates how these four dominant archival temporalities differently interact with platforms, producing and forming the ways that communities and platform power can be seen in the future.

A compelling facet of the emergence of digital platforms is the phenomenon of “super apps”. This paper looks at the case of Grab, billed as the Southeast Asian super app. Highly significant in its own right, Grab is an exemplary instance of the rise of digital transaction platforms in digital economy and everyday life. In this paper, we look at the evolution of Grab from an app through a platform to its creation as a super app. We argue that Grab seeks to combine various transaction functions within its super app multiverse, ranging from payment services to credit services under-written by escrow funds to public-private partnerships that channel revenue collections and social spending. By such means, Grab has become an essential infrastructure of everyday life for millions across the region and has achieved international prominence, but its profitability and purpose remain fragile. It shows that such digital transaction platforms, in their super app phase, leave open a wide field of possibilities to imagine what these infrastructures might and should look like in the future.

Although the formal integration of e-commerce through TikTok Shop has not yet been fully launched in Europe, users leverage other platform affordances, such as livestreaming, to facilitate shopping. In the Netherlands, TikTok LIVE serves as a hybrid space where entertainment, interaction and commerce come together, exemplifying the platformisation of consumer culture on social media. This article examines how streamers and viewers stage shopping as an interactive, participatory spectacle during Black Friday week, exploiting the governance arrangements that regulate livestreaming. Based on qualitative textual analysis of 131 LIVE sessions across 80 accounts, we observe and document how e-commerce unfolds both within and beyond the app. First, we identify norms of interactions and self-governance of shopping across three formats: live auctions mediated via chat, external sales directing users to websites and community-driven giveaways that reward previous buyers. Second, we analyse roles performed by users during LIVEs, highlighting a range from charismatic influencers to transaction-oriented sellers, and the division of labour among streamers, moderators and viewers. Finally, we reflect on the implications of these practices for consumer law, highlighting how the temporality, emotional engagement, self-surveillance and commercial orientation, which are fundamental to the live shopping phenomenon, are enabled by the legal uncertainty regarding TikTok's role.

While political content, particularly from warzones, is frequently subject to moderation and censorship on social media platforms, pro-Palestinian creators face uniquely constrained conditions when speaking up for their cause. Often physically confined, they use digital platforms to connect with diasporas, share everyday struggles, and amplify narratives to a global audience. On these platforms, they are both hyper-visible and hyper-censored, challenged by opaque moderation systems, anti-Arab biases, and narrative erasure driven by platforms’ monetary interests and political pressures. This study examines how pro-Palestinian activists on TikTok navigate these challenges through qualitative interviews with 13 content creators. Participants describe experiences of visibility moderation and content removal, often under vague or inconsistent enforcement. These accounts align with the concept of platform gaslighting, in which unclear explanations and ineffective appeals foster uncertainty and mistrust in platform governance. Yet our findings reveal that, despite these pressures, the well-connected creators we interviewed continue to develop creative strategies to maintain visibility and avoid suppression. Through collective action, they expose misleading community guidelines, contest platform gaslighting, and resist silencing, reflecting a broader struggle over freedom of expression in algorithmically governed spaces.