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In this thesis, I explore the ways in which the locative platform, TripAdvisor mediates touristic placemaking through a case study which centres on Edinburgh's Harry Potter tourism scene. This case study is based on three years (2018-2021) of digital, ethnographic research and is illustrative of a setting in which algorithmic navigation is essential to maintaining and/or establishing one's touristic service in time and space. Drawing on 'relational materialist' histories of tourism, work which elaborates on Foucauldian notions of governance, ANT/STS and digital sociological scholarship, I forward an imagining of this genre of platform as 'geo-pastoral technologies' and 'social partners' to cultural-economic actors who accommodate tourists in the destinations travelled. This conceptualisation is useful for making sense of the specific qualities of this partnership which emerged in my corpus of data -- including it functioning as a 'promotional partner' and being used as a 'thinking partner' -- and enables me to position these qualities as ongoing accomplishments which require work on the part of touristic organisations mapped on the platform. This work, and particularly the 'socio-technological techniques' developed and mobilised to maintain this partnership demonstrate how the algorithmic navigation of locative media platforms is a complex, collective, and more-than-digital endeavour. In particular, I argue that the algorithmic navigation of TripAdvisor can be understood as a form of 'affective ordering' which involves: attempting to translate affects onto the platform, attending to the content which accumulates on the platform, and sometimes assembling a digital response and/or re-ordering the collective of things and factors which are understood to be preventing them from assembling a "good experience", and in doing so attempting to differently affect future touristic audiences. I conclude by reflecting on what this ethnographic case study can contribute to our understanding of platform governance, algorithmic navigation, touristic working practice, and orderings.

Digital platforms that employ algorithmic technologies to facilitate transactions have become popular in many contexts characterised by underdevelopment. What does it mean for society and its politics when people in such contexts become pervasive users of digital transaction platforms? I address this by venturing out to Manila and Jakarta-Southeast Asia's largest megacities-to study ride-hailing platforms through interviews, ethnography, and document analysis. I present three studies, which tackle different aspects of the question. The first study examines how digital platform companies employ strategies to win legitimacy in new markets. The second study investigates how the adoption of digital transaction platforms affects the social clamour to improve public systems. The third study explores the strategies that consumers develop to protect themselves against the algorithms and rules that represent the platform's interests. I make two important contributions to digital platforms research. First, I uncover previously unexamined ways in which platforms' characteristics provide powerful advantages to platform companies in shutting down opposition and strengthening society's reliance on their services. For example, since workers buy assets for the platform, the investment compels them to defend the platform's interests, enhancing the platform's power to resist and influence authorities. Second, I show how adverse conditions shape the socio-political impacts of digital platforms by amplifying the advantages of platform companies, sometimes triggering socio-political feedback loops that perpetuate underdevelopment. For example, deficiencies in pre-existing public systems can drive platform users to politically support technological solutions that benefit few, while devaluing public systems that benefit many, thus weakening the social clamour for improvements in public services. The lessons from underdeveloped contexts need not be confined to developing countries. Adverse conditions that hinder people from living a good life exist everywhere, even in so-called developed countries. Thus, my findings can help many governments and societies who are "Ubering while poor"-that is, using digital platforms in adverse contexts-to better understand the perils and potentials of digital technologies.

What is the nature of private platform authority and its causal and consequential role in shaping contemporary political communication and the spread of disinformation and propaganda online? This thesis integrates three distinct studies that examine how platform authority – including the technical, social, economic, and institutional practices of private companies – shape contemporary political communication and the creation and dissemination of propaganda and disinformation. By illuminating some of the hidden affordances of digital platforms and their algorithms, I explore how people find, watch, and discuss news and politics in a mediated environment that is increasingly characterized by attention economics, surveillance capitalism, and black-box decision-making. My first study examines the politics of Google Search and explores when keyword metadata generated top placements for “junk news” and other conspiratorial, hyper-partisan, or disinformation websites. My second study looks at the politics of Twitter and examines how hashtags and automation were used by foreign state actors to demobilize, target, and harass civil society activists working on issues pertaining to women’s rights and empowerment. My third study looks at the politics of YouTube, and how the introduction of state-backed media labels affected how users consume, comment on, and criticize information from these sources. Each of these chapters show that social media platforms all have affordances that are open for political manipulation by actors with very few resources and technical skills. But more importantly, these studies also demonstrate the importance of private actors for contributing to strong institutions of political communication in private spaces: we depend on Google Search, Twitter, and YouTube to faithfully implement technologies and policies that support the civic functions they often deny they perform. I show how the privatization of democracy – through the institutional and technical decisions of platform companies – shape public life, not always for the better.

A key feature of the material infrastructure of hate speech online on Facebook is virality – the rapid transmission of content over large distances through key nodes and actors on the platform. Virality is enabled by the bringing together of collectivities (crowds and publics) and connectivity provided by Facebook, which is accessed widely through Internet-enabled mobile phones. In contemporary India, increased connectivity provided by the material infrastructure of Facebook has reconfigured the relationship between crowds, publics and media, facilitated virality, and led to deadly illocutionary and perlocutionary effects such as inter-group violence and the subordination of minority groups. This thesis investigates how Facebook, through its content moderation policies and related institutional mechanisms and infrastructures, regulates the virality of hate speech online on the platform. Drawing on contemporary developments in India and the historical development of Indian hate speech doctrine, this thesis identifies emerging tensions between the global scale of hate speech regulation on Facebook and local context. These emerging tensions are visible in Facebook’s framing of its community standards on hate speech, and in the relationship between Facebook and national and subnational actors in India. These tensions are also visible in differences and contradictions in how actors who are part of Facebook’s governance model, including the Oversight Board, have approached the question of the regulation of hate speech online. This thesis employs mixed methods including a law-in-context reading of doctrine, documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews conducted with members of the Facebook Oversight Board, employees of Facebook and lawyers, academics and policy experts in the field. This thesis is part of a growing body of scholarship that examines the regulation of hate speech online and virality on Facebook through a non-United States and non-European lens.

This dissertation aims to extend existing IT and platform governance perspectives by examining external stakeholders’ governance roles. Motivated by the growing importance of IT in business, Essay 1 investigates financial analysts’ external IT governance role of challenging a firm’s IT initiatives during an earnings conference call. Specifically, this research examines how analysts’ IT-related questions help executives with higher IT competence in (a) disclosing firm’s information related to IT in their response to the challenges and (b) improving the stock market returns to the firm’s future IT decisions. Essay 2 focuses on governance mechanisms in blockchain-based online communities. We specifically investigate the two novel governance mechanisms enabled by blockchain: (a) the cryptocurrency vesting period and (b) users’ self-governing practice of distributing the decision power in the platform. We examine how reducing the cryptocurrency vesting period influences users to become myopic in terms of their self-governing practice. Collectively, this dissertation takes a step into uncovering how external stakeholders influence the value creation process of IT.

By investigating Samsung’s platform strategies, organizational culture and control mechanisms in the Android ecosystem, this research provides a balanced view on the global smartphone platform industry. In addition, this dissertation provides both empirical evidence and critical explanations by exploring the challenges of global leading manufacturer Samsung, especially Samsung’s Media Solution Center (hereinafter, MSC) which was in charge of software and platform services of the company. In the literature review and methodology chapter, this study reviews 1) how successful platform providers actually control other platform participants, 2) how they develop platform ecosystems and extend their businesses, 3) how a fast follower strategy which is considered a typical strategy of Samsung Electronics affects business performance, and 4) how cultural elements of organizations affect the performance of a company, especially an ICT firm. This research poses three research questions: RQ 1: How did Samsung’s platform strategies such as the fast follower strategy affect MSC’s platform services? RQ 2: How did the platform governance and control mechanisms in the global smartphone industry influence Samsung’s platform services? And RQ 3: How did the organizational culture of Samsung and MSC influence Samsung’s platform businesses? The research relies on interviews with 25 platform experts who once designed and worked on platform services such as Samsung Apps or Bada in Samsung’s MSC. This study basically explores business experiences of Samsung’s MSC whose challenges were not successful. Since Samsung’s attempts to control a platform failed, this research is in part a study of failure. In this it deviates from the typical study that pays much attention to the winner’s position or experience rather than that of a loser. Based on the interview data, this research provides significant findings. First, Samsung’s strategy of being the fastest follower generated positive network effects for the Google Play Store instead of Samsung’s platforms. Second, Google tightly controlled its competitors’ platform services in diverse (somewhat unfair) ways in order to maintain its dominance. Lastly, Samsung’s hierarchical and micromanaging organizational culture exerted negative influence on MSC’s platform services.