Social Media Fragility Indicators: A framework for evaluating social media as fragile states
ORCID
Caroline Haythornthwaite: 0000-0002-7311-3140
Document Type
Presentation
Date
8-7-2025
Keywords
social media, fragile state, SM Fragility Indicators
Language
English
Acknowledgements
Anatoliy Gruzd, Philip Mai Social Media and Society workshop attendees, London UK, 2024 Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Bochum, Germany for support of workshop in 2025; Co-organizers: Philip Mai, Anatoliy Gruzd; on site participants: Johannes Breuer, Christina Chueca-Del-Cerro, Felipe Soares, Katrin Weller; off site: Jeeyun (Sophia) Baik, Jennifer Grygiel
Disciplines
Communication | Library and Information Science | Sociology
Description/Abstract
Social Media Fragility Indicators: A framework for evaluating social media as fragile states
Presented at the Media Sociology Symposium, August 7th 2025
In the uncharted domain of cyberspace, social media platforms have stepped in and stepped up as state-like entities – social states – enacting governance structures supporting a variety of state services: security to safeguard user data, public services such as content moderation, regulations for civil behavior laid out in platform standards, and policing and sanctioning behavior. As social media has increasingly become the site for public discourse, platform policies are establishing these social media as ‘de facto regulators’ of opinion, information, and news, and how these are delivered by whom, to whom, and under what circumstances. Yet, these nascent social states are fragile. Platforms are challenged by new leadership directives, the problem of keeping up with the competing demands for content moderation, internal pressures from users, external pressures from domestic and non-domestic governments, and changing landscape of participants, external concerns, and social media features.
This research adopted the a ‘social media as state’ analogy to make sense of cases, controversies, and the continuously emergent practices on social media. While the ‘social media as state’ analogy has its limits, as social media have become more pervasive and seemingly independent of nation states, the analogy encourages attending to state-like functions as they are reproduced in the social organization of each social media state. Moreover, the state analogy provided the rationale for following on the idea of fragility from the Fund For Peace Fragile States Index, using their model to derive a set of fragility indicators for social media (https://fragilestatesindex.org/indicators/). Analysis of a wide range of literature on social media led to the derivation of a set of six Social Media Fragility Indicators which will be the focus of this talk. In brief, the indicators address: technical vulnerabilities and protections, internal social pressures, fragmentation, human rights, economic conditions and external pressures.
Recommended Citation
Haythornthwaite, Caroline. (2025). Social Media Fragility Indicators: A framework for evaluating social media as fragile states. Keynote address presented at the Media Sociology Symposium, August 7th 2025
Source
submission
Creative Commons License
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