Digital resistance to algorighmic exploitation: Twitter activism of Argentine delivery platform workers during the Covid 19 pandemic

Abstract

Digital platforms have been defined as a technological fix that emerged in the global economic center during the first decade of the twenty first century, when platforms became the central infrastructure mediating between different user groups, build around the exploitation of data. Originally developed in Europe and the United States, these platforms soon expanded to other regions of the world, leading to the global expansion of algorithmic exploitation from the center to the periphery in a process of uneven and unequal development. In particular, in this chapter we analyse the specific way in which organised workers used digital platforms to mobilise in a period when strict lockdowns made it really difficult to develop traditional actions of protest such as public demonstrations or face to face meetings. Based on the study of digital activism during the strictest lockdown in the country (from March to July 2020), we argue that Argentine workers creatively found in digital platforms a way to channel their protests in the context of increasing work precarity and the difficulty of using their traditional repertoire of protests. The chapter uses a mixed-method approach that combines traditional methodologies such as in-depth interviews with workers and activists and the analysis of flyers and documents from activist organisations with a novel approach to the study of twitter activism. Based on these interviews and documents, we reconstruct the situation of work, precarity and activism of delivery platforms workers during the pandemic. This provides the scenario to understand the second source of data that we analyse in the chapter, which consists of a dataset with 56100 tweets by 23161 users, which are related to delivery platform strikes or protests in Latin America that were posted between March 1 and July 31 of 2020.