Abstract

This article addresses how platform closure is produced by drawing on interviews with former employees of MySpace, the social media platform popular in the mid-2000s. Focusing on how staff grappled with user-generated content and user data while sunsetting an old version of the MySpace platform in 2011 to make way for a newly configured MySpace platform that debuted in 2013, it chronicles the decisions that platform employees were faced with while closing a platform, and the values and worldviews that ultimately shaped what remained of the old site. The article shows that sunsetting a platform and acts of technological destruction more generally are not arbitrary or neutral processes with fixed outcomes, but rather processes of sociotechnical production that vary in consequential ways.

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