The concept of platform society, as developed by José van Dijck, refers to the way societies are organized in a networked world where several social sectors have become dependent on the giant media platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. Both private and public sectors are concerned: in the fields of education, urban transport, news consumption, health, and others, interactions, transactions and several forms of communication are entirely dependent on the infrastructure created by these platforms. Consequently, the platforms have become a crucial force in people’s everyday life.
Social, economic, and interpersonal data flows are largely driven by this global online platform ecosystem in our day. While the big five platforms are tremendous facilitators that enable people to engage with each other, and to receive news etc., at the same time they are also gaining control of people’s daily activities. The platforms not only provide important – and today essential – services for their users, but also monitor and collect the data flows connected to them and trade in the gathered data.
This data management raises a few concerns. Platforms can combine and analyze the data they have collected and thus have become enormously knowledgeable about users’ behaviour. This knowledge is a very valuable currency because it can be used as input for generating new knowledge, for creating user profiles, or for developing new analytical tools and artificial intelligence.
However, it is not clear who is responsible for these operations and who guarantees the privacy and other rights of users. One of the key challenges in the above context is to protect traditional public values in a connective world. In addition to privacy and security, other important traditional social values are transparency, accuracy (for example, of news), and society itself. The risks and issues (like hate speech) raised by data collection may be regulated and managed at the national level, but the platforms operate as global companies set up for business and registered in the US. The theory of the platform society points to the importance of democratic processes and looks at networked societies from a specifically European perspective.
