Platform rule: Facebook, corporate power, and networked publics

With over three billion users, Facebook has direct access to a larger population than any state or nonstate actor in history. This article examines Facebook’s power by constructing a political history of platform rule—the transnational exercise of state-like rulemaking by digital platforms that structure how networked publics form and interact. While much social media research rests on behavioral micro-foundations, this article mobilizes historical International Relations (IR) approaches to macro power to explain how Facebook generates collective political effects at scale. Drawing on theories of state power, the article conceptualizes platform rule through three dynamics. First, adapting Michael Mann’s concept of infrastructural power, it shows how Facebook creates dependencies that organize communication and participation within networked publics. Second, building on James Scott, it analyzes how data surveillance and algorithmic curation render collectives legible—and selectively illegible—in ways that enable manipulation. Third, drawing on Charles Tilly, it conceptualizes Facebook’s governance as a protection racket in which the platform generates harms through expansion and then unevenly mitigates them, particularly in the Global South. Empirically, the article draws on two decades of media reporting, leaked internal documents, and employee memoirs to trace Facebook’s involvement in genocide, election interference, and mass surveillance. The article makes two contributions to IR scholarship on corporate power and private authority: it demonstrates that theories of state power offer critical leverage for understanding platform capacities to govern people directly, and it reveals how platform rule produces hierarchically organized networked publics with systematically unequal protections.