Geomedia Speaker Series - The Platformization of the follower factory: Para-platforms, automation and labor in the market for social media engagements

OCTOBER 30, 2025
ROOM: 12A226
13.15-14.45

This lecture will discuss the emerging illicit, sprawling yet obfuscated global market for artificial social media engagements such as Instragram followers, which inflates follower counts and engagement metrics on social media profiles and posts. The organization of this market has previously been characterized using industrial metaphors such as “click farms,” “follower factories,” and “digital sweatshops” primarily based in the Global South.

In response, we discuss a mixed-methods approach that integrates ethnography with digital methods, which has allowed us to describe a shift from manual interaction toward automation. The platformization of the follower factory has facilitated the rapid expansion of a multi-sided market, enabling resellers to scale up and consequently necessitating a more complex labor organization that includes marketing and customer service, which have shaped cottage industries across the Global South. This market capitalizes on social media platform economies, using the existing infrastructure and user accounts to operate. In other words, the engagement market has become centered on what we term a para-platform ecosystem, which, while operating alongside, remains reliant on social media platform infrastructure.

By examining and conceptualizing platformization and platform ecosystems “from below,” as well as the conflictual asymmetry yet productive relationship between the para-platform ecosystem and social media platforms, we provide an unprecedented description of the engagement market while challenging and expanding the boundaries of platform theory.

Johan Lindquist is Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, a member of the editorial board of Pacific Affairs, has published articles in journals such as Platforms & Society, Social Media + Society, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Mobilities, Public Culture, Pacific Affairs, and International Migration Review, is the co-editor of Who’s Cashing in? Contemporary Perspectives on New Monies and Global Cashlessness (Berghahn, 2020) and Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), the author of The Anxieties of Mobility: Development and Migration in the Indonesian Borderlands (University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), and the director of B.A.T.A.M. (DER, 2005). His research interests include migration, Indonesia, digital labor, and methodology.