Free software meets Facebook: Placing digital platforms’ usage by free culture communities

Abstract

The use of digital platforms in social movements has given the Internet a central role in analyzing activism over the last decade. However, social networks’ potential for social change has to be analyzed critically and take complex economic and political contexts where actors remain unequally powerful into consideration. Through a combined methodology, this article explores the tensions of free culture communities in Spain when using proprietary digital platforms. These communities include 1651 platforms, of which 1162 are proprietary, and 489 are free. They describe a complex ecology in which they use proprietary platforms or free alternatives depending on their ultimate goals. The logic of technological corporations is notably imposed when communities aim to communicate with outsiders as commercial social networks attract a significantly greater number of users.