This paper examines the role of platform corporations in shaping public imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI). While traditional media have long been scrutinised for influencing public discourse, this study highlights how platforms simultaneously host, participate in, and steer debates around AI. Employing Meta as a case study, the research conceptualises platform corporations as multifaceted stakeholders with significant global influence. A mixed-method approach considers four streams of data to analyse Meta as (1) interfacing academia through research and education, (2) the AI industry, (3) AI governance, and (4) media representation before analysing the corporation's impact on larger public discourse. Drawing on document, platform, and content analysis, the paper explores the dynamic interactions between corporations, users, third parties, and other stakeholders. Findings indicate that Meta acts as a multifaceted stakeholder, actively shaping other stakeholders’ AI imaginaries from various angles. It strategically engages with different audiences through public communication, content, and applied technology.

We propose a framework for considering ways in which workers in the IT industry shape current and future political life. We reason that in an increasingly datafied society (Couldry, 2020; Ruckenstein, 2023), the social, political and technical practices of IT workers inevitably undermine privacy (Zuboff, 2019), fairness (Farrell & Fourcade, 2023), free speech (Kreiss, 2015) and activism (Feldstein, 2021). We therefore outline a framework that explores IT workers’ interventions in the public domain, such as protests and volunteering; their involvement in policy making – lobbying, legislation efforts etc.; and their political input in the products they create, where their values are materialized in code. We propose, in conclusion, to use this tripartite framework to study both the dystopian implications of datafication – and industry practices that challenge its seeming inevitability.

Innovation is a central yet ambiguous goal in the European Union’s digital agenda. Within the AI Act, innovation is positioned as both an economic imperative and a normative principle. Globally, however, innovation is often equated with unbounded growth and the belief that technological progress is inherently beneficial, sometimes even magical – an outlook rooted in Silicon Valley techno-optimism. Scholarship has examined how these imaginaries shape AI discourse primarily in the US context; less attention has been paid to European AI governance. Drawing on qualitative interviews with eleven EU digital policy experts, this study explores how innovation is articulated in the EU AI Act. The findings demonstrate competing innovation narratives that (partly) challenge techno-optimist narratives, converging around what I call institutional optimism: a belief that locates transformative potential not in technology itself, but in institutional intervention as the necessary mechanism for realising its benefits and mitigating its harms.

This study examines the judicial adjudication of live-streaming tipping in China (2017–2024), conceptualizing the courtroom as a site of "juridical purification" where affective intimacy is liquidated into contract law. Analyzing a corpus of civil judgments through mixed methods, the research reveals how platform infrastructures and algorithmic designs—such as gamified incentives and "humanized feedback loops"—are rendered legally invisible, effectively naturalizing the commodification of relational labor. Findings demonstrate a regime of "infrastructural determinism," where legal classification is anchored to technical payment pathways, and a "myth of the rational autonomous user" that individualizes the risks of algorithmic persuasion. Ultimately, by translating affect into contract, legal institutions resolve the Collingridge dilemma by ossifying dystopian imaginaries into doctrinal routines. This institutional "re-embedding" (Polanyi, 1944) of the digital economy ensures that intimate connections remain governed by market-driven contractual logic, foreclosing alternative visions of digitally mediated human connection.