Governance in Social Media Platforms of Minority Organizations

Abstract

Social media platforms can offer a sense of social inclusion and equitable access to information for minority groups, including minority immigrants to Western countries. However, even as they empower minority community-based organizations (CBOs) to assist their members, these platforms can also create conditions for further exclusion and inequity if they are too exclusive (i.e., drift towards segregation) or too inclusive (i.e., drift towards dilution). This paper aims to extend prior platform governance research to understand how to govern minority CBO platforms featuring both minority and non-minority members in a way that maintains a balance between segregation and dilution, the two paradoxical forces of drifting. By adopting a longitudinal, grounded-theory study of three social media platforms in a minority CBO (one segregated, one balanced, and one diluted), I identify three categories of governing practices (ajar gatekeeping, opportunity manipulating, and output harmonizing), which maintain platform balance against segregational or dilutional drifting.