Beyond the Normative: Novel Approaches to the Politics of Legibility in Platform Society

Abstract

How do platforms make publics readable, and what happens politically when being “seen,” “counted,” and “governed” depends on fitting the formats, metrics, and categories through which platforms and states recognize collective life? This panel advances a non-normative agenda for studying platform society by centering legibility as the key mechanism through which voice, visibility, and authority are produced. Across three papers, legibility is treated not as a descriptive by-product of mediation but as a constitutive political process: it renders certain preferences, identities, and claims intelligible and scalable while leaving others risky, opaque, or institutionally unusable. By moving beyond normative debates about “free speech versus censorship” or “good versus bad regulation,” the panel develops analytical tools for comparing how algorithmic personalization, format-driven visibility, and authoritarian governance converge around a common political problem, making “the people” legible.

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