Reviewing the impact of Facebook on civic participation: The mediating role of algorithmic curation and platform affordances

ABSTRACT

Datafication changes variables of our society within the political and cultural realms. In this study, we argue that platform affordances and algorithmic curation can impact users’ civic participation through filtering and classifying users’ online political content. Scholars from various disciplines – among them communication, computational studies, and political science – are working on different concepts in order to understand such effects. What we already know is that users’ civic participation is often mediated by algorithmic curation on the one hand, and by the platform’s built-in logic – often referred as mechanisms of affordances – on the other. Few works are cited across the field pointing out the significance of algorithmic personalization in the making of civic participation. One question that still plagues the research is how the impact of Facebook on civic participation is mediated by algorithmic curation and platform affordances. This paper responds to this need by locating existing scholarship within a common conceptual framework using as a starting point: algorithmic curation, civic participation, and platform affordances. This provides a logical structure that facilitates connections between concepts and disciplines that might otherwise be difficult to discern on an interdisciplinary basis.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordances
• algorithmic curation
• civic participation
• facebook

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The concept of mediation in this study, is grounded on Verbeek (2005, 2006) definition, which points out that technological mediation concerns the role of technology “in human action (conceived as the ways in which human beings are present in their world) and human experience (conceived as the ways in which their world is presented to them)” (p.363). It concerns the linkages created by a technological artifact with a subject, which it might facilitate individuals’ involvement with a particular aspect of reality. In this sense a technological artifact can be understood as a mediator of human-world relationships. Thus, the technological artifacts are not neutral but can actively shape subjects’ perception, action, experience (Verbeek, 2006) online and offline.