Despite the growth of reactionary networks, the "alt-tech" platforms built to host their content have failed to make a profit. Nevertheless, investors continue purchasing shares in alt-tech firms, enabling them to grow. This paper contends that, in order to understand the economic and ideological trends driving the growth of alt-tech platforms, Internet studies must rupture from traditional understandings of value and apprehend speculative value, or the social currency assigned to a platform's products, assets, and mission as they are assumed to appreciate over time. Through rhetorical criticism of financial, corporate, and investor-relations communications of five alt-tech firms (Gab, Rumble, Telegram, Trump Media & Technology Group, and X), this paper identifies a rhetoric of techno-publicity through which reactionary digital platforms solicit investiture. Techno-publicity posits privately-owned platforms as ideal mediators for democratic discourse, securing their speculative value. I identify three discursive pillars present in alt-tech financial statements: a) transgressive individualism, which states that digital infrastructure is best stewarded by entrepreneurs; b) digital producerism, which holds that technical expertise is the only requisite skill for mediating healthy publics; and c) network fetishism, which characterizes platformed user networks as decentralized and thus the surest mediator of public discourse. These discourses project the alt-tech firm into the future as an ideal steward of digital democracy by imbuing investor confidence in the figure of the CEO and the values of cyber-libertarianism. I conclude by situating techno-public rhetoric within the business model of all social media platforms, alt-tech or otherwise, elucidating the ongoing backslide in platform governance.

With viewership and subscription rates breaking countless records, MrBeast has become the contemporary digital household name. The YouTube channel and content creator Jimmy Donaldson tell a tale of unmatched dedication to the maximization of user attention through the tools offered on YouTube and built by MrBeast. In the era of digital media and dominant neoliberalism, internet platforms and internet media strive to maintain as much screen time per user as possible, inevitably creating an economy that values user data as an analytic tool to transform into more and more attention. Through conversation and explicit connection, a discursive persona emerges that combines Donaldson and the MrBeast content company, intertwining Donaldson’s personal connection to the maximization of attention to the business interests of the company. Thus every piece of MrBeast branded (or related) media showcases the brand ultimately directed towards this goal of capturing and perfecting the attention algorithm. In this paper, I argue that the MrBeast online persona epitomizes the digital neoliberal rationality portrayed through the contemporary attention economy. Through a textual analysis of the main channel's long-form YouTube content and interviews with Donaldson, a discursive association emerges between MrBeast and digital neoliberal logics. Moreover, the achievement of the channel on YouTube and far beyond ultimately validates and helps inform how the channel’s usage of such logics reached previously unimaginable success.

This paper examines the emerging illicit, sprawling yet obfuscated global market for artificial social media engagements, 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. Using a mixed-methods approach that integrates ethnography with digital methods, this research delineates the platformization of the follower factory, highlighting a shift towards automation rather than manual interaction. This shift 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 bases to operate. In other words, the engagement market has become centered on what we term a para-platform ecosystem, which, while operating in parallel, remains reliant on social media platform infrastructure. By examining platformization and platform ecosystems from below, this study not only provides an unprecedented description of the engagement market but also challenges and expands the boundaries of platform theory.

Social media play a pivotal role in managing the environments where political debate and public deliberation occur, and therefore must contend with the targets set by official bodies and policymakers to ward off harmful speech and mis/disinformation in their platforms. However, little is known about the criteria applied by social platforms’ content moderation infrastructure to address problematic information. This paper examines the speech governance parameters applied by Meta’s 3PFC to moderate problematic information. Leveraging digital methods and approaches developed in journalism studies, it implements a series of manual and computational techniques to curate a comprehensive dataset combining fact-checking content commissioned by Meta’s 3PFC program—available through the Facebook URLs Dataset (Meta, n.d.)—and fact-checks produced independently from Meta’s program. We probe this database to identify the criteria applied by Meta’s speech governance through the 3PFC program across five countries: Argentina, Philippines, Portugal, United Kingdom, and South Africa, with content spanning three languages (English, Spanish, and Portuguese). Considering the looming end of Meta’s 3PFC system worldwide and the recently declared laissez-faire commitments of US-based tech companies to public speech (Silverman, 2025), this paper addresses the normative standards consolidated by Meta’s content moderation infrastructure through outsourced fact-checking work. The findings contribute to developing platform governance policies in a context where countries like Australia, Brazil, India, and the European Union are designing or implementing regulatory frameworks to hold social platforms accountable (Anastácio, 2024; Liu, 2024; Ó Fathaigh et al., 2021).