The politics of alt-tech platforms: Promoting far-right community through platform design and governance

Alternative social media sites have mushroomed over the past years. From Mastodon gaining popularity after Elon Musk bought Twitter, to far-right populist political endeavors like Donald Trump’s Truth Social, the market of social media is diversifying. The proliferation of platforms, some with explicit political commitments, raises new challenges for researchers exploring community formation and platform governance, and the relationship between the two. Yet much of the debate continues to focus on large, mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, omitting these smaller, alternative competitors. In this paper, we analyze how four alt-tech companies - Gab, Odyssey, Bitchute, and Truth Social - position themselves and their products within the broader political economy of social media, and how this is conditioned by the economic, legal, and regulatory environment in which each platform operates. By extension, the design and governance of these platforms contributes to each platform's appeal among various sectors of the far-right, and affects the particular kinds of far-right communities which coalesce on them.