The relationship between politics and social media platforms has drawn a considerable amount of public and scientific interest. On one hand, platforms have appeared as emancipatory spaces with the potential to foster political participation. On the other, their commercial and data-driven nature is believed to play a major role in the decay of Western democracies. The dissertation contributes to the debate by studying the platformization of politics through Finnish political actors’ experiences of social media use. With the conceptual focus on platformization, the dissertation distances itself from perspectives that address platforms as primarily strategic tools for gaining visibility, winning elections, or mobilizing collective action. Instead, it examines the ways in which platforms have become mundane and infrastructural facilitators of political agency. In this sense, platformization paves the way for various experiences, practices, and imaginations about direction and future democracies in this new era of media. It also creates a space to consider how politics should ideally be practiced and, more broadly, to reflect on the meaning of “the political.”

The dissertation approaches the platformization of politics through a methodological lens of digital everyday life. This lens was adopted as a framework in the research project Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture, in which the research for the dissertation was conducted. The approach focuses on political actors’ engagements with platforms and emphasizes the relevance of actors’ everyday practices and emotions instead of treating particular social media uses as inherently more political than others. In doing so, the dissertation leans toward a feminist understanding of politics where private experiences taking place outside of formal institutions are also regarded as political. This is why the research material involves political actors whose online experiences stem from very different social locations: members of parliament, young and aspiring politicians, and gender minority social media users. The research material consists of 52 interviews and 28 media diaries.

This report summarizes three research articles. Article I studies young politicians’ lives on platforms by considering the relationship between platforms’ “social media logic” and the politicians’ own agency. It discusses whether politics is becoming “deeply mediatized” under platform power. Article II examines the experiences of Finnish gender minority social media users. It proposes that by blurring the boundaries between public and private matters, platforms engender political agency and, more generally, broaden what it means to act as a political person. Article III studies MPs and young politicians. It focuses on how participants understand and navigate political conflicts and differences in their everyday social media use. The article proposes that platforms operate as agonistic rather than deliberative spaces for political engagement. As such, they demand an increasing amount of emotional management.

The findings of the research articles are discussed in this summarizing report through three aspects of platformizing politics: intimacy, conflict, and vulnerability. These aspects address, first, the increasing relevance of platforms in shaping everyday political practices with and around media; second, the friction between consensus-driven Finnish political culture and the pervasive visibility of political conflict on social media; and third, the ways in which platforms, despite their egalitarian promises, can amplify and obscure – and in some cases even help to mitigate – gendered injustices of the social world. The dissertation concludes that platformization both challenges and cherishes contemporary Finnish democracy: While maintaining a critical stance on tech giants’ power and the political media cultures fostered by data-driven systems, the dissertation emphasizes the variety of outcomes when new media technologies meet with individual desires and the political world.