2025 Tom O'Regan Public Lecture

Platform Epistemology: Shaping Algorithmic Knowledge in the Visibility Game presented by Assistant Professor Kelley Cotter

All are welcome to attend our free event.

About the lecture

Understanding of platform algorithms is central to the creative and strategic work of achieving and sustaining an audience online, as they determine who and what becomes visible in feeds. Platforms have long been criticised for concealing details about their algorithms in ways that limit creators’ agency. This talk extends those critiques by introducing the concept of platform epistemology, an additional vector of platform power shaping creativity, labour conditions, and inequity within promotional cultures.

Kelley will illustrate platform epistemology through a case study of Instagram influencers, demonstrating platforms’ control over the epistemic resources shaping the practices by which influencers construct and legitimate knowledge about algorithms. Influencers learn about algorithms via observation, experimentation, desk research, social connections—particularly with platform employees—and training from self-proclaimed algorithm experts. Throughout these learning processes, Instagram, as both an infrastructure and commercial entity, shapes the availability, distribution, and perceived legitimacy of information, influencing how the community constructs and values knowledge about its algorithms. Here, the “visibility game” structures not only pursuits of visibility but also the community of practice through which influencers come to know algorithms. Platform design and disclosure decisions thus do more than constrain and enable creators’ strategies; they actively shape the production and distribution of knowledge about how visibility works.

About our speaker

Kelley Cotter is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University whose research explores how data-centric technologies (especially algorithms) shape social, cultural, and political life. Her research examines how everyday users understand and interact with algorithmic systems, and how these insights can inform more equitable forms of platform governance.

Event details

Date: Thursday 13 November 2025
Time: 3:45pm for 4–5pm followed by light refreshments
Location: Room 1M16, 308 Queen Street, UQ Brisbane City (view map) 

Enquiries: engagement@hass.uq.edu.au

This lecture hosted by UQ's School of Communication and Arts is supported by the Tom O'Regan Visiting Fellowship, and presented as part of the Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies Symposium: Darkness to hyper-visibility: exploring promotional and creator cultures of social media.

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