Digital Labor and Political Economy of Social Media

Digital labour on social media encompasses the unpaid and under-recognised work performed by users as they create content, generate data and engage with platform interfaces. Underpinning this activity is a political economy shaped by platform capitalism, wherein companies extract value by commodifying attention, personal information and social interactions. Algorithms serve to capture and channel user engagement into monetisable assets, reinforcing power asymmetries between platforms, advertisers and users. The seamless convergence of production and consumption—often described as prosumption—enables platforms to appropriate surplus value without formal employment relationships. As a consequence, social media becomes both a site of intense exploitation and a space for contestation, with implications for labour rights, privacy, democratic discourse and global inequalities. Critical scholarship has sought to unpack these dynamics by re-examining classical theories of labour and value, extending them to account for datafication and the diffuse forms of agency that animate digital networks. Simultaneously, activist and design-oriented interventions propose alternative frameworks—grounded in the commons or care—to resist enclosure and to foreground the social relations that sustain platform functions. The study of digital labour and the political economy of social media therefore spans analyses of algorithmic governance and attention extraction, critiques of monopoly power and user exploitation, and explorations of emancipatory practices aimed at reshaping technology for collective benefit.

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Digital Labor and Political Economy of Social Media publication trend

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Technical terms

Digital labour: User activities that produce value for platforms without formal compensation.

Platform capitalism: An economic system in which digital platforms mediate, extract and monetise social and economic interactions.

Datafication: The transformation of social actions into quantifiable data for analysis and commercial exploitation.

Machinic agency: A post-anthropocentric notion of distributed agency arising from interactions among human and nonhuman actors.

Caring technologies: Design and practices that foreground care work and reveal invisible forms of labour under digital capitalism.

References

1. The value and price of digital media commodities. Media Culture & Society (2023).
2. Dismantling AI capitalism: the commons as an alternative to the power concentration of Big Tech. AI & SOCIETY (2022).
3. Digital Labour in the Platform Economy: The Case of Facebook. Sustainability (2018).
4. Machinic agency and datafication: Labour and value after anthropocentrism. Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2023).
5. Caring Technologies: Confronting Invisible Work in Digital Capitalism. Sociology Compass (2024).