THE INVISIBLE MANAGEMENT OF VISIBILITY-DRIVEN WORK: GOVERNANCE BY SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS.

Social media platforms (SMP) are technologically mediated social action spaces that profit from collecting and selling user data. Users, not platforms, create content that attracts audiences and advertisers. While they are free to interact, they must do so in ways programmed to add value to the platform. Thus, if users are driven toward achieving organizational goals, all phenomena on these platforms have an organizational substrate. Even though business and management studies have consistently produced literature on gig work intermediation platforms, SMP are not included among digital labor platforms. By combining business literature, social sciences, platform studies, and critical algorithm studies, this theoretical essay proposes a conceptual framework that presents SMP as an organizational form of production, management, and work. This framework is then confronted with research findings on content creators, revealing that the three self-governance strategies of SMP effectively manage creators by instilling hope of visibility and fear of invisibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]