AS IN LIFE, SO IN DEATH: EMPLOYEE VALUES AND CONTENT PRESERVATION DURING PLATFORM CLOSURE

Abstract

Despite dominant cultural narratives about platform vitality, whether their immense global penetration or companies’ overwhelming political and economic power, platform history is marked by shutdown and failure. Companies and sites shutter with an understated regularity. As they go, they often delete large swaths of user content, with consequences for the memory practices of both individuals and communities. In turn, this paper examines the ethical approaches that platform employees bring to the process of platform shutdown and user content deletion. This phenomenon is analyzed using 52 interviews with employees from now-shuttered platforms. Drawing on literature on values in technology, technological breakdown and decline, as well as from critical approaches to the study of platforms, this paper articulates the ways that platform employees understand the ethics of social media data deletion, and how these ethics come to shape what remains of these platforms after they close.