This study explores the use of ChatGPT for social media marketing strategies and its potential impact on employment. We take stock of the literature on productivity gain and the automation of work to unpack the role of AI in devising social media marketing strategies. To this end, we carried out in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 social media professionals who informed a follow-up experiment using ChatGPT to generate social media marketing strategies for two companies. The results support the hypothesis of Generative AI leading to increased productivity in the creation of social media marketing, as the experiments yielded high-quality marketing strategies tailored to the specific needs of a company with consistent brand identity. The results, however, also highlight the limitations in using AI for marketing campaigns, as these tools cannot fully replicate the creativity and intuition of human professionals. We conclude with an assessment of potential risks associated with data protection and ethical considerations when using AI tools.

This paper argues that AI systems must be understood as extensions of centuries-old platform infrastructures rooted in empire. A telling anecdote comes from a senior Microsoft scientist who asked a generative model to depict “an Indian girl under a tree reading a book.” Instead of producing her desired childhood reflection, the system defaulted to white, Western images—revealing how foundation models encode colonial value systems. Like Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, the circulation of meaning is pre-structured by Western archives that dominate training data. This dynamic is not new. The British East India Company operated as the first global platform: it centralized trade through charters, maps, tariffs, and racial ranking systems, sustaining a multi-sided market without producing its own content. Just as the EIC tweaked terms and conditions to regulate life across continents, modern AI platforms hard-code racial capitalism into digital infrastructures. Contemporary Platform Studies often miss this continuity, framing platforms as neoliberal novelties rather than as inheritors of colonial techniques of privatization, dispossession, and labor precarity. Today, national initiatives such as India’s foundational AI model demonstrate both possibility and peril. While framed as sovereign alternatives to Western dominance, such projects risk reproducing exclusion by privileging some languages and identities over others. In contrast, Indigenous data sovereignty movements—such as Te Mana Raraunga in Aotearoa—foreground communal ownership and resistance to state or market capture. This paper situates “Global Southing” not as a guarantee of decolonization but as a contested terrain where platform power may either reinforce or unsettle colonial continuities.

This study explores the phenomenon of dropshipping on Facebook, focusing on the role of digital advertising in shaping informal online markets. Dropshipping allows entrepreneurs to sell products without holding inventory, relying on third-party suppliers for procurement, storage, and shipping. The model has become popular due to its low startup costs and minimal regulatory oversight, especially in the context of social media platforms. Through a collection of Facebook advertisements gathered by Australian citizen scientists as part of the Ad Observatory project, the research uses "trace ethnography" to follow digital traces such as links, web pages, and third-party review sites, identifying dropshipping stores and understanding their operation. The study uncovers patterns in online advertising, such as the use of ambiguous locations, the absence of physical stores, and repeated store names, which suggest an informal, often transient business model. Four case studies illustrate different types of dropshipping operations, ranging from failed attempts to established brands that remain largely unregulated. The paper argues that Facebook’s advertising platform blurs the lines between formal and informal economies, giving equal visual legitimacy to a wide range of vendors. This uniformization, however, places the responsibility of determining a business’s legitimacy on consumers, who must navigate a complex web of often misleading traces. The study contributes to understanding the role of digital advertising in fostering informal markets and the challenges of ensuring trust and legitimacy in platform-mediated commerce. It also offers insights into the cultural and regulatory implications of dropshipping in online economies.