Search

Indonesia's conditional cash transfer program serves only the "objectively perceivable" poor—those who fit its parameters of eligibility and appear in the official poverty data. It creates two populations of poor people: the legible and eligible, or user poor, and the illegible and ineligible, or nonuser poor. In Surabaya the nonuser poor—who constitute half of all poor people—benefit from a de facto distribution of cash transfers that operates in the low-income neighborhoods (kampungs) through a figuration of people that is made up of cash transfer users, nonusers, providers, and brokers. It reveals actually existing welfare at work in the blind spots of objectively targeted welfare. Actually existing welfare cannot be understood as a set of official policies, roles, or technological interfaces but as a set of locally embedded relationships that bring welfare subjects into existence. Without understanding these relationships that form on the edge of welfare, it is not possible to understand the labor involved in producing the poor in targeted schemes like Indonesia's conditional cash transfer program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media engagements, such as likes and follows, have become crucial for driving algorithmic recommendations and underpinning platform economies. This has given rise to disinformation industries that focus on the production and sale of engagements, including Instagram followers—a phenomenon we term the "engagement as a service" market. However, this market poses significant challenges for empirical research as its operations remain obscured from the scrutiny of platforms, their users, and researchers alike. In this article, we propose a mixed-methods approach to make visible the relationship between the engagement market and platform governance, the latter of which increasingly aims to moderate account behavior in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity—what we refer to as "authenticity governance." By developing this approach, we explore the relationship between the engagement market and platform ecosystems through three case studies: (1) engagement market responses to platform governance; (2) the evolution of engagement as a service; and (3) testing the quality of engagement as a service on Instagram. These investigations allow us to comprehend disinformation as an ongoing negotiation between the engagement market and authenticity governance. Overall, our three integrated approaches can help researchers move forward with the empirical study of disinformation markets that operate at the periphery of platform ecosystems. In short, this article presents a methodological outlook for analyzing (in)authentic engagements as a form of disinformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]