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1. Red flags, sob stories, and scams: The contested meaning of governance on carework labor platforms

   https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221099233  

   Ticona, Julia (July 2022, New Media & Society)

   Labor platform scams are an opportunity to integrate scholarship about governance across social media and labor platforms. Labor platforms have borrowed governance mechanisms from social media to cultivate trust among users and remove problematic content. However, while these platforms may share governance strategies, labor platforms mediate employment relationships between workers and clients with different amounts of power. Based on a multistakeholder ethnography of carework labor platforms, online careworker forums, and interviews, this study describes scams on carework labor platforms. Labor platforms narrate workers into the role of technology consumers, constricting their own obligations to workers. Workers’ explanations of scams vary, with some contesting and others aligning with platform narratives. Some workers seek support in online forums, which remediate the harm of scams for some but also enroll workers in unpaid labor. These scams challenge the assumption of antagonism between the interests of workers and platform companies and highlight the consumerization of work. 

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2. Platformization of Inequality: Gender and Race in Digital Labor Platforms

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3637385  

   Munoz, Isabel; Kim, Pyeonghwa; O'Neil, Clea; Dunn, Michael; S awyer, Steve (April 2024, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   We contribute empirical and conceptual insights regarding the roles of digital labor platforms in online freelancing, focusing attention to social identities such as gender, race, ethnicity, and occupation. Findings highlight how digital labor platforms reinforce and exacerbate identity-based stereotypes, bias and expectations in online freelance work. We focus on online freelancing as this form of working arrangement is becoming more prevalent. Online freelancing also relies on the market-making power of digital platforms to create an online labor market. Many see this as one likely future of work with less bias. Others worry that labor platforms' market power allows them to embed known biases into new working arrangements: a platformization of inequality. Drawing on data from 108 online freelancers, we discuss six findings: 1) female freelance work is undervalued; 2) gendered occupational expectations; 3) gendered treatment; 4) shared expectations of differential values; 5) racial stereotypes and expectations; and 6) race and ethnicity as an asset. We discuss the role of design in the platformization and visibility of social identity dimensions, and the implications of the reinforced identity perceptions and marginalization in digital labor platforms. 

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3. Platform-mediated Markets, Online Freelance Workers and Deconstructed Identities

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3555092  

   Munoz, Isabel; Dunn, Michael; Sawyer, Steve; Michaels, Emily (November 2022, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   We advance the concept of deconstructed identity to explain how online workers' identities are being reshaped, diminished and controlled by digital labor platforms. We focus on online freelance workers and contribute to contemporary conceptualizations regarding worker's self-presentation. The empirical basis for our analysis and theorizing build from two rounds of a longitudinal panel study of online freelance workers and their interactions with online labor platforms. Findings illuminate how online freelancer's identity presentation is constrained by the structuring of their profile, the ratings and client feedback, the algorithms used by the digital platform, and platform's terms of use. Data demonstrate that workers' profiles are focused on skills, reflecting the realities of competing for work in under-regulated labor markets. Study participants report the centrality of client and platform ratings of their work, and the need to manage client feedback and ratings as a core part of their online identity presentation. These findings suggest that, far from a subjective and personal story, a freelancer's identity on a digital labor platform is better understood as a standardized depiction of skills, ratings, and metrics controlled by platform algorithms. Coupled with use policies and evolving platform designs, this platform control creates what seems to be a form of indentured servitude. We further note online freelancers both recognize this control and resist their deconstructed identity. 

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4. Materializing Activism. Introduction to the Special Issue on Materializing Activism

   Hansson, Karin; Cerratto, Teresa; Bardzell, Shaowen (December 2021, Computer supported cooperative work)

   Hansson, Karin; Cerratto, Teresa; Bardzell, Shaowen (Ed.)

   Online activism showcases how available digital tools allow social movements to emerge, scale up, and extend globally by fundamentally enabling new forms of power. This special issue brings together eight research articles that engage with the collaborative efforts embedded in various types of activism by studying features such as the socio-technical systems involved; how the activism is organized; relations between traditional and social media; and the complex network of systems, information, people, values, theories, histories, ideologies, and aesthetics that constitutes such activisms. The articles show the spaces in which this activism materializes, and particularly their situation in several intersecting dimensions including motivation, culture, language, and infrastructure. Together, these articles reflect the methodological breadth required to materialize online activism and the need to develop a more nuanced conceptualization of the media ecologies involved. By mapping out how activism is enabled and constrained by human-computer interfaces, this special issue contributes to open up the black box of online activism. 

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5. Powerful Privacy Norms in Social Network Discourse

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3479565  

   McDonald, Nora; Forte, Andrea (October 2021, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Social media companies wield power over their users through design, policy, and through their participation in public discourse. We set out to understand how companies leverage public relations to influence expectations of privacy and privacy-related norms. To interrogate the discourse productions of companies in relation to privacy, we examine the blogs associated with three major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram (both owned by Facebook Inc.), and Snapchat. We analyze privacy-related posts using critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how these powerful entities construct narratives about users and their privacy expectations. We find that each of these platforms often make use of discourse about "vulnerable" identities to invoke relations of power, while at the same time, advancing interpretations and values that favor data capitalism. Finally, we discuss how these public narratives might influence the construction of users' own interpretations of appropriate privacy norms and conceptions of self. We contend that expectations of privacy and social norms are not simply artifacts of users' own needs and desires, but co-constructions that reflect the influence of social media companies themselves. 

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