Social media platforms are too often understood as monoliths with clear priorities. Instead, we analyze them as complex organizations torn between starkly different justifications of their missions. Focusing on the case of Meta, we inductively analyze the company’s public materials and identify three evaluative logics that shape the platform’s decisions: an engagement logic, a public debate logic, and a wellbeing logic. There are clear trade-offs between these logics, which often result in internal conflicts between teams and departments in charge of these different priorities. We examine recent examples showing how Meta rotates between logics in its decision-making, though the goal of engagement dominates in internal negotiations. We outline how this framework can be applied to other social media platforms such as TikTok, Reddit, and X. We discuss the ramifications of our findings for the study of online harms, exclusion, and extraction.

中文翻译：

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内部断裂：社交媒体平台的竞争逻辑


社交媒体平台常常被理解为具有明确优先级的庞然大物。相反，我们将它们分析为复杂的组织，其使命的理由截然不同。以 Meta 为例，我们归纳分析了该公司的公开材料，并识别出塑造平台决策的三种评估逻辑：参与逻辑、公共辩论逻辑和福祉逻辑。这些逻辑之间存在明显的权衡，这通常会导致负责这些不同优先级的团队和部门之间发生内部冲突。我们研究了最近的例子，展示了 Meta 如何在决策逻辑之间轮换，尽管参与的目标在内部谈判中占主导地位。我们概述了如何将该框架应用于其他社交媒体平台，例如 TikTok、Reddit 和 X。我们讨论了我们的研究结果对在线伤害、排斥和提取的影响。