EMPOWERING VOTERS AND FOSTERING HEALTHY POLITICAL DISCOURSE: DISCURSIVE LEGITIMATION BY DIGITAL MEDIA PLATFORMS IN THE CONTEXT OF ELECTIONS

Resumen

The role of digital media platforms as societal actors has been increasingly brought to the fore in recent years. We have also grown to understand how platforms foster actors and media formats not motivated by liberal and democratic norms. Critical scholarship has pointed out the role of platforms in amplifying extreme content and misinformation, allowing for the manipulation of political processes and communication, and intervening in the processes of political communication more broadly. In this study, we focus on the discursive strategies adopted by the platforms to publicize and justify their actions related to electoral and political communication on their services. We ask, how do platform companies articulate elections as a context through which they discursively construct their role and legitimacy as major actors in society? Using a large dataset of corporate blogs from ten platform companies (N=27,616, n=413, years 2006-2022) we show a shift from an opportunity-focused discourse that promotes participation, digital democracy, and politician-citizen interaction to a more defensive discourse stressing companies’ responsible attitude to elections, as evidenced by their transparency efforts, advertising control, fact-checking initiatives, and strategic partnerships. Our findings demonstrate an institutionalization of discourses among the platform companies and highlight their reactive response strategies from feature development to corporate legitimation strategies. The platforms strategically mobilize the empowering participation-focused discourses typically used to describe social media to rebuild their legitimacy and position them as proactive agents in society.