ABSTRACT
Social media platforms are now among the most valuable companies in the world and their impact on everyday life is enormous. In this chapter, I analyze the global landscape of the social media industries (SMIs) and investigate the dynamics behind the emergence of social media giants. I start with conceptualizing SMIs and explain their key characteristics. I continue by elaborating how platformization and datafication, alongside network effects, contribute to the emergence of a winner-take-all economy. I apply this framework to examine the rise of the social media giants in the United States and China, and how these form the social media oligopolies represented by the groupings GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent). To analyze SMIs, this contribution argues a combination of media economics (ME) and critical political economy (CPE) is required for understanding not only the behavior of individual firms but also the societal and political consequences of concentrations in ownership. The chapter concludes by asking about the impacts of corporate power in the SMIs, especially as social media platforms become frontrunners in data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capitalism.
