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The production of alternative discourse about labor platforms provides an opportunity to bridge scholarship on activism across platforms. This analysis advances an understanding of platforms’ power to shape discourse and users’ power to push back. From content producers to Uber drivers, digital laborers find ways to share information. Scholars of online activism have shown that platforms can facilitate counterpublics—communities where excluded voices construct resistant discourses. However, theories of counterpublics are underused in studies of digital labor to examine discursive contestation. Extending feminist counterpublic theories, we examine the online discourse about Care.com, a domestic work platform, finding significant platform control over public discourse. However, despite their formal separation on the platform, workers and clients use “networked gossip” to construct what we call a “platform counterpublic.” By bringing together scholarship on counterpublics and critical literature on labor platforms, this article offers a relational approach to resistance in platform labor. 

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. 

Abstract Previous studies generally assume that barriers to internet access are largely passive. That is, exclusion from the Internet is a consequence of poorly resourced individuals, communities, and institutions. This study complicates that assumption by focusing on the active policing and gatekeeping of internet access. Specifically, we estimate the causal effect of free Wi-Fi at chain restaurants on quality-of-life crime reporting by leveraging a staggered difference-in-differences design which compares geo-located crime reports near chain restaurants in Chicago before and after those restaurants introduced free Wi-Fi. We find that free Wi-Fi led to a substantive and significant increase in quality-of-life policing when restaurants were located in wealthier and Whiter areas, but not in other areas. Our findings suggest that internet access itself may be actively policed by social institutions, in our case, national chain restaurants and the police, to protect access for some at the expense of others.