This paper is a case study of the organization The Trust Project, the global coalition of news media and publishers that emerged out of these round tables and these concerns, and their efforts to influence standards-making (including the categorization of media, as well as prioritization and recommendation) at the major platform companies. The Trust Project, founded by Sally Lehrman, is comprised of over 200 news media organizations around the world. The goals of The Trust Project were twofold: (1) To guide publishers on how to make ethical commitments more transparent and visible to potential readers; and (2) To make these commitments “machine-readable” in the hopes that platforms would use this information to differentiate them from other, including user-generated, information sources competitors (Smith, 2017).

This paper explores The Trust Project, and its relationships with platform companies, as a case study to examine how platform companies – as organizations and as technologies – do or do not adopt the values of other industries and professional communities. It uses institutional theory to make the case that specific inter-organizational dynamics can facilitate or inhibit how these values are or are not translated into specific technologies and media. This work demonstrates that organizational constraints and a lack of transparency/access into the operation of platforms, limit the effectiveness of these networked efforts, leading external organizations to make significant investments while still having limited influence.

Generic visuals – that is, images with standardized formats and appearances and which perform particular design functions, such as stock photos and simple data visualizations – circulate with increasing frequency, often on social media, given their ‘shareability’ (Hanusch and Bruns 2017). They populate digital journalism and other online information sources, across apps and platforms, yet unlike arresting, iconic photographs or award-winning data visualizations in the news, generic visuals have been the subject of little academic scrutiny.

To understand whether and how generic visuals play a role in assembling publics, we considered how audiences engage with and make sense of these image types. We carried out 35 interviews with demographically diverse digital news audiences in the UK to explore how they make sense of generic visuals. In this paper, we show how participants negotiated narratives about stock photos (as stereotyped and clichéd) and data visualisations (as truthful) and how these negotiations informed the constitution of mundane publics. Through diverse and multiple engagements with generic visuals shared or encountered online, participants felt connected to others in mundane and everyday ways. We argue that because of their abundance, networked circulation and flexibility, generic visuals can be seen as resources for people to think about their personal lives in relation to a greater whole, and therefore central to what Hariman (2016) defines as ‘public culture’, that is, ‘the envelope of communication practices within which public opinion is formed’.

In this work, we chart the multiple conflicts between stakeholders in the pursuit of a common standard for fact-checking outside Western Industrialized Educated Rich and Educated (WEIRD) countries, a problem that sits at the center of the institutional mission of fact-checkers as watchdogs of politicians and enforcers of content moderation. We apply reflexive thematic analysis to a set of interviews with 37 fact-checking experts from 35 organizations in 27 countries to catalogue the methods employed by fact-checkers and the pressures they contend with in non-WEIRD countries. In contrast to the one-size-fits-all approach to community guidelines implemented by social platforms worldwide, our results show that the asymmetric relationship with platform companies compels fact-checkers to adjust their methods and strategies to account for the political and cultural dimensions driving mis- and disinformation in their local contexts. Our findings detail three ways through which social platforms impinge on the scope, values, and institutional mission of non-WEIRD fact-checking organizations. As we argue, the platformization of non-WEIRD fact-checkers entails a convoluted process in which social media platforms gradually nudge fact-checkers into becoming part of the content moderation industry, a shift that runs counter to the democracy-building values underpinning the fact-checking movement. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for content moderation both in WEIRD and non-WEIRD contexts.