Platform Politics in Europe | Self-Appointed Representatives on Facebook: The Case of the Belgian Citizen’s Platform for Refugee Support

Increasingly, representation is seen as an interplay of representative claims. In this article, we study the representative claims formulated by Belgium’s Citizen’s Platform for Refugee Support (CPRS) and examine how the CPRS justifies its right to speak on behalf of others. Our qualitative analysis centers on the content of the CPRS Facebook page and how its features and affordances shape the CPRS’s representative strategies. Our findings reveal that the CPRS’s claims produce an alternative conception of “we, the people.” To create this other generality, the CPRS taps into the registers of pr... Mehr ...