Major platform companies like Facebook and Google thus clearly already
operate a number of products and services with infrastructural properties (they
are shared, widely accessible systems that are used by a wide range of actors for
many different purposes) (Plantin et al. 2016), so far in ways primarily governed
by inherited legal and regulatory frameworks and individual companies’ own
sense of mission and terms of service (Gillespie 2018). Yet we are beginning to
see the institutionalization of platform organizations through an increasingly
heated public debate over what formal rules and informal norms should govern

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108890960 Published online by Cambridge University Press

148

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen & Richard Fletcher
Social_Media_and_Democracy