How new is platform power?

This chapter examines how corporate grassroots lobbying (CGL) is employed by lean platforms in platform power: the mobilisation of users and allies towards political outcomes by platform corporations. Platform power, it is argued, takes four main forms, each of which combine and innovate around existing practices. CGL has become an important tool for businesses in the new digital economy to shape regulation and influence public opinion, and this chapter seeks to explain its origins and what forms it takes. At the end of the chapter the wider political and economic context in which platform power should be understood, and its wider implications, are described. Here, it is argued that platform power, among other contemporary trends, extends the dynamic in which corporate institutions and logics increasingly dominate political as well as social life. At the same time, it is argued, platform power is simultaneously reactive to, and dependent on, the power and legitimacy of grassroots collective action. Platforms mobilise their users and allies in order to neutralise critical and increasingly successful social movements, but the success of platform power in generating corporate counter-movements has so far been only partial. Before that, I argue against literature which has suggested that digital platforms have their own entirely distinctive political logics, and that platform power is a new phenomenon (Pollman and Barry 2016 , Culpepper and Thelen 2020). Rather, platform power combines new elements with several established practices, especially drawing from the tradition of corporate political organising. These practices have been innovated on in five ways, in particular around platforms’ particular connection with their users and their intensive collection of data, and the adoption and further professionalisation of civil society practices such as community organising.

Corporate political mobilisation as a political strategy of firms is mainly practised in North America, and has taken various forms historically (see Walker and Rea 2014). When it involves ordinary people or citizens it is generally referred to using the concept of CGL. Until recently, it relied on the outsourcing of grassroots political action by corporations, trade associations, some advocacy organisations and electoral campaigning to third parties, which became increasingly common in the United States through the development of public affairs consultancies during the 1980s (Walker 2014).