Introduction

Research on platform labor has emerged in recent years (^{Casilli, 2019}; ^{van Doorn, 2017}). However, communication is still an underrepresented element in the area. On the one hand, there are studies, such as ^{Mosco (2009}) and ^{Figaro (2018}), which point out how work and communication are interconnected, but without referring exclusively to digital platforms. On the other hand, there is research on platform labor that highlights the role of social media in the organization of workers (^{Cant, 2019}; ^{Lazar et al., 2020}) and the rhetoric behind the so-called “sharing economy” (^{Codagnone et al., 2016}). However, there is no systematic examination about the centrality of communication for platform labor.

We argue that communication plays a central role in the platformization of labor (^{Casilli & Posada, 2019}), as a way of organizing - in the sense of ^{Sodré (2019}) - both for the workers’ control, surveillance and management, and for the organization of workers and construction of worker-owned platforms. Communication works across the entire circuit of platform labor (^{Qiu et al., 2014}) from their infrastructures and materialities to consumption practices.

Platforms, in addition to digital infrastructures supplied by data and automated by algorithms (^{Srnicek, 2016}; ^{van Dijck et al., 2018}), act as means of production and communication (^{Williams, 2005}), which engender ways of work and interaction. Their materialities provide the technical bases for the organization of work (^{Plantin et al., 2018}; ^{Woodcock & Graham, 2019}) and are designed for some interactions to the detriment of others (^{Costanza-Chock, 2020}; ^{Wajcman 2019}). Based on their affordances, there are politics around digital platforms to dismantle communication between workers and facilitate the worker-consumer relationship (^{Popescu et al., 2018}; ^{Wood & Monahan, 2019}).

The mechanisms of workers’ surveillance, data collection and extraction (^{Couldry & Mejias, 2019}), as well as algorithmic management, operate not only within the platforms but also through processes of consumption itself (as a communication process), either as “customer” - nomenclature commonly used by platforms - or “worker”. That is, data policies and algorithmic mediations operate from communication processes.

Communication is also central to the organization of platform workers, whether in unions and associations, in emerging collectivities and solidarities or in the construction of worker-owned platforms (^{Scholz, 2016}; ^{Soriano & Cabañes, 2020}; ^{Wood et al., 2018}), as elements of the circulation of workers’ struggles (^{Dyer-Witheford et al., 2019}; ^{Englert et al., 2020}). This shows that workers do not passively accept the production and communication contexts of the platforms but create strategies and tactics for their everyday work (^{Cant, 2019}; ^{Sun, 2019}).

Thus, we can summarize the place of communication at platform labor from the following vantage points: (a) designs and materialities of the platforms; (b) work organization and management; (c) organization of workers, as formal and informal spaces; (d) data and algorithm policies; (e) consumption of platforms; and (f) platforms’ media strategies.

Based on these elements, this article focuses on the media strategies of platforms as one of the dimensions of the role of communication in platform labor. The background is that there is a dispute over control of the meanings about what the platforms mean - including work and workers. This struggle for meanings occurs within the scope of communication throughout the circuit of labor (^{Qiu at al., 2014}), but finds, in the platforms’ discourses, a privileged place for analysis.

Thus, the article highlights the notion of “circulation of meanings” in ^{Silverstone (1999}) to investigate, in a specific way, how platforms build communication and media (therefore social and discursive) worlds about themselves. The ethos (^{Maingueneau, 2001}) is an expression of this circulation of meanings. For example, platforms use strategies such as advertising and public relations campaigns to circulate brand meanings across different social fields. Moreover, they intend to control the meanings of the public debate regarding labor platforms. Their discourses circulate with some values ​​and meanings to the detriment of others, as symbolic expressions of class struggles (^{Grohmann, 2018}). This theoretical framework allows us to understand the ideological clashes and disputes around the meanings (^{Baccega, 1995}; ^{Voloshinov, 1973}) built in the world of work (^{Figaro, 2018}), as opposed to theoretical perspectives that start from the place of the company or the brand as neutral.

In addition, the circulation of meanings is the basis of economic support for these platforms. In other words, signs circulate as a form of capital (^{Goux, 1973}; ^{Marazzi, 2011}; ^{Rossi-Landi, 1973}). Thus, the circulation of discourses is an indication of the role of communication in financialization (^{Sodré, 2019}) and in the mechanisms of rentism (^{Sadowski, 2020}).

So, media strategies of the platforms work as forms of justification, sedimentation and crystallization of positive meanings of the platforms, building imaginaries in line with a neoliberal and entrepreneurial rationality (^{Dardot & Laval, 2013}) and with the Silicon Valley ideology (^{Liu, 2020}; ^{Schradie, 2015}). Thus, they intend to persuade workers and consumers that they are innovative, disruptive and socially responsible companies. Expressions such as “gig economy” and “sharing economy” are also part of this circulation of meanings and are traces of a corporate platform capitalism (^{Frenken & Schor, 2017}; ^{Pasquale, 2016}; ^{Scholz, 2016}; ^{Srnicek, 2016}). These dominant narratives also claim that platforms have no ties to workers and that they are only mediators who help workers - according to the literature on the issue (^{Dubal, 2019}; ^{Gibbings & Taylor, 2019}; ^{Karatzogianni & Matthews, 2020}; ^{Rosenblat, 2018}). The literature on media strategies of platforms in the so-called “global south”, especially Latin America, is still underrepresented. This does not mean, however, that these strategies are unique, as they are connected to a geopolitics of platforms (^{Graham & Anwar, 2019}) and subsumed in the Silicon Valley ideology, which presents colonial features (^{Atanasoski & Vora, 2019}; ^{Couldry & Mejias, 2019}; ^{Liu, 2020}).

This article aims to analyze how delivery and ride-hailing platforms in Brazil have built their ethos on social media, as media strategies, in the context of the first Brazilian strike of the workers within the scenario of the pandemic. The construction of the platform’s ethos - and their ways of producing and circulating meanings - is a symbolic element of class struggle and, at the same time, a dimension of the role of communication in the platform labor (^{Grohmann, 2018}; ^{Silverstone, 1999}).

We conducted a content analysis on social media (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) - as a privileged locus of circulation of meanings - from two delivery (iFood and Rappi) and two ride-hailing platforms (Uber and 99), the main ones in Brazil. Our hypothesis considered that the communication presented by these companies prioritizes broader sectors of society (especially consumers), whereas the dialogue between platforms and their workers is rarefied, except to posit the value of the platform itself.

The analytical categories are: “pandemic and health” (contextual dimension in relation to the health crisis); “citizenship and diversity” (recurrent dimension in the discourse produced by the platforms, in line with the literature review); “relations with brands and influencers” (visibility work of the platforms with specific interested audiences); and “workers’ representations” (as a central element of the sign dimension of class struggles). Platforms’ media strategies, focused on consumers, present meanings of charity, philanthropy, citizenship and diversity, saying they are open to the demands of workers. The results show how the communication of platforms on social media play a central role in class contradictions as their sign dimension in the context of the platformization of labor.

Context and Methodology

The working conditions of drivers and delivery workers have similar characteristics in various parts of the world, as evidenced in the research by ^{“Fairwork” (2019)}. However, countries in the global north have specificities, as they have historically had the minimum consolidation of a welfare state and regular employment (^{Huws, 2020}). The so-called “global south” is not a deviation from the standard, but is itself what constitutes a standard and norm in global economies (^{Alacovska & Gill, 2019}; ^{Chen & Qiu, 2019}; ^{Graham, 2019}; ^{Sun, 2019}; ^{Wood et al., 2018}). This means historically locating and contextualizing both the countries of the north and those of the south - which also have many heterogeneities among them. What the platform labor has in common in the global south are the legacy of the informal economy and the contradictions surrounding their post-colonial condition, with its revolutionary potentials and regressive pitfalls (^{Grohmann & Qiu, 2020}).

In these terms, platform labor presents: (a) a generalization of the typical work of the peripheries of the world to the global north, with a subordination to the platform oligopolies (^{Abílio et al., 2020}); (b) for the global south, the new is not the gig or the precarity of work, as they have historically been the norm, as a permanent way of life for the working class. The novelty is precisely the dependence on digital platforms to ensure workers’ survival (^{Grohmann & Qiu, 2020}).

Latin America also presents heterogeneities in relation to the most used platforms and regulatory issues (^{Cordero & Daza, 2020}). Brazil is an example of this scenario of platformization of labor, presenting about 23% of the worldwide users of Uber, which arrived in the country in 2014 (^{Amorim & Moda, 2020}). In 2019, approximately 4,000,000 Brazilians work for the main platforms in the country - Uber, 99, iFood, and Rappi (^{Amorim & Moda, 2020}).

Delivery workers, in general, earn less than $200 a month and are typically Brazilians, blacks and young people (^{Aliança Bike, 2019}), highlighting the intersections between class and race that are historical in the country. The pandemic has accelerated the platformization process, with increasing reliance on platforms for livelihood. In March 2020, the number of orders on food delivery platforms grew by 77% in the country, but riders are working harder and earning less, with more competition (^{Abílio et al., 2020}). In some way, the pandemic contributed to the visibility of these workers, as they support people who are in social isolation.

In this scenario, riders and drivers are more exposed to the risks of being contaminated by covid-19. In an analysis of the policies of 123 platforms in 22 countries during the pandemic, a report from the ^{“Fairwork” project (2020)} points out a contradiction between the views of platforms and workers. Platforms say they are communicating all measures to workers, such as the distribution of personal protective equipment. However, from the viewpoint of workers, the promises did not come true. Many had to pay for personal protection products and were denied claims for sickness benefits (^{Howson et al., 2020}). Researchers at ^{“Fairwork” (2020)} point out that, at best, platforms are slow to adopt emergency measures and, at worst, are more concerned with public relations strategies and consumers rather than workers.

In Brazil, even more precarious working conditions added to the exposure of risks and the visibility of these workers as essential workforce during the pandemic, which helped in the organization of delivery workers to mobilize two national strikes during July 2020 (1st and 25th of July). They were the biggest labor strikes in the country in the last decade, with self-organization of workers mainly by social media, in a country of continental dimensions. The main demands were increased pay, an end to unfair blockages and the scoring system, as well as adequate provision of personal protective equipment without workers having to pay for it. Riders also appealed to the solidarity of consumers, asking them not to order anything from the platforms in the days of strikes (^{Abílio et al., 2021}).

This is the background for the analysis we conducted on media strategies of four ride-hailing and delivery platforms in Brazil. The context of a pandemic and workers’ strike has placed platforms under public scrutiny when they felt compelled to intensify their media strategies, as a symbolic dimension of class struggles. According to ^{Abílio et al. (2021}), there was a change in news coverage between the first and the second strike of delivery workers. Legacy media started to use data and views of the platforms to the detriment of the workers’ perspective. The context of platform labor in Brazil contradicts, on the one hand, the viewpoint of workers, according to the scenario described above, and, on the other hand, the viewpoint of platforms, which aims to control public discourse through the meanings that they circulate about themselves.

Based on this, we conducted a content analysis of communication from four platforms (Uber, 99, iFood, and Rappi) from Brazilian accounts² on the following social media - Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube - between June 15 and August 15, 2020, a period justified by the context of strikes and pandemics. Social media accounts were chosen because they have become spaces par excellence for visibility and circulation of meanings in the context of platformization (^{Leaver et al., 2020}; ^{Poell et al., 2019}). That is, social media are central to the platforms’ media strategies, in the sense of promoting and circulating their brands positively (^{Scolere et al., 2018}), that is, their ethos. In addition to the specific materialities of each platform (^{Bucher & Helmond, 2018}), we argue that ethos - and the platforms’ media strategies - circulate their meanings through different social media, which are a privileged locus for the circulation of meanings. We also emphasize that the media strategies of platforms are not limited to social media and that there are other possibilities not analyzed in this research, such as journalistic pieces and official pages, for example. The corpus is introduced in Table 1.

Table 1 Research Corpus - Between June 15 and August 15, 2020 

At first, we observed irregularities between the different platforms and their uses of social media. Of all platforms, iFood is the one that has used social media the most. While Uber, iFood and Rappi made more posts on Twitter, 99 mainly used Instagram. This irregularity also happens temporally on each platform. iFood, for example, the biggest target of delivery strikes, intensified its publications in July, but after the first week of August, it spent weeks without any post. Rappi has not posted on August on Instagram and Uber has not updated his Facebook page since June 2020.

Of the four platforms, only Uber can be considered, from the beginning, as a global platform. Headquartered in San Francisco, it is present in 69 countries and arrived in Brazil in 2014. 99 was created in 2012 by three Brazilian entrepreneurs and, initially, intended to only mediate contact between taxi drivers and passengers. Then it became an Uber competitor. In 2018, the company was sold to the Chinese DiDi (^{Chen & Qiu, 2019}), the world leader in the segment. In the delivery sector, iFood is a leader in Brazil, where it was founded in 2011. Currently, it has a presence in other countries in Latin America, such as Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia. Rappi was founded in 2015 in Colombia and arrived in Brazil in 2017. It promises to deliver not only food, but anything that the consumer asks for, including documents. They are the main platforms in the delivery and ride-hailing sectors in Brazil, which reveals an origin mainly in the global south, specifically in Latin America. However, this does not mean that media strategies of these platforms are very different from those based in the north, as they are shaped by colonial ideologies and linked to platforms in the United States (^{Atanasoski & Vora, 2019}; ^{Davis & Xiao, 2021}).

Results

Media strategies of the platforms in a period are threads that present historicity, which is not a novel subject (^{Bakhtin, 1979}). As an example, the platforms’ websites - which are not in our corpus - are evidence of how the meanings of the platforms circulate, presenting themselves as citizen brands, with social responsibility and purpose. ^{Uber (n.d.)} highlights “global citizenship”. ^{99 (n.d.)}, on the other hand, presents itself as a data-driven company that values diversity. Rappi claims that its “partners” work “with love” (https://www.rappi.com.br/). This attribute is also highlighted by ^{iFood (n.d.)}: “passion for food and technology”. In addition to these elements, corporate communication is generally focused on the consumer, for example, Rappi states “an app that is revolutionizing the way that Brazilians do their purchases” (https://www.rappi.com.br/).

Specifically, the corpus of the research reveals that the meanings of the platforms circulate through the different media simultaneously. We chose four categories from the corpus, with the circulation of meanings of platforms on social media as a backdrop. The first category - “health and pandemic” - is contextual and refers to the context of the global health crisis. The second - “citizenship and diversity” - is at the center of corporate strategies: the values of citizenship and diversity, as discursive elements of platforms with social purpose and for the common good, in line with research that analyzes narratives and entrepreneurial rationality (^{Casaqui & Riegel, 2016}).

The last two categories involve relationships and representations with specific stakeholders. On the one hand, influencers and other brands help to circulate the values of the platforms and to circulate meanings of credibility, as a visibility work (^{Abidin, 2016}). On the other hand, workers’ representations on the platforms are part of the significant dimension of class struggles, with regimes of visibility and invisibility (^{Hall, 1997}), in order to gain the adhesion of workers and public opinion.

Conclusions

Media strategies of platforms in their accounts on social media are only one aspect of the communication of these companies - among other possibilities of circulation of meanings. And this discursive dimension is just a role of communication in platform labor, from design to consumption, in a circuit of labor. The platforms’ discourses present historicizations and go beyond the period chosen for this corpus. Social media accounts represent a synthesis of how meanings circulate on platforms, in order to reassemble and crystallize meanings about the digital economy, consumers and workers.

The results show that, on the one hand, platforms present specificities in their designs, worker profiles and working conditions, according to ^{Schor et al. (2020}), their media strategies across different sectors, with similar narratives and discourses. The choice of two areas (ride-hailing and delivery) resulted in more similarities than differences between the discursive positions of the platforms. This is also due to the ideological circulation of platforms in various countries around the world, in line with colonial values and linked to Silicon Valley ideology. Thus, the article argues that media strategies of the platforms can meet local specificities, but their meanings tend to circulate internationally.

The analytical categories - “health and pandemic”, “citizenship and diversity”, “relations with brands and influencers”, and “workers’ representations” - proved to be less exclusive than complementary to each other. The core of the platforms’ media strategies is to position themselves as citizen companies, linked to diversity, the common good, the purpose of the social good, in favor of unity and not of polarization, with social responsibility. This happens in different dimensions. Imaginaries promoted by their discourses - of citizenship, diversity, and social responsibility - place platforms as central agents for the whole well-being of society. The idea that working is an opportunity is in line with many workers’ discourses in the global south (^{Wood et al., 2019}). These meanings can be an indication, for future research, in the discourses of other platforms in the global south, with potential for generalization, given the strength of its circulation.

The discourses on health and pandemic are the context of the circulation of the meanings of the platforms - showing that platforms’ initiatives are being made to mitigate the effects of covid-19 in society. The relations with brands and influencers, in turn, point to the ways in which platforms direct their discourses to consumers. From the partnerships, they show themselves as versatile companies and concerned with the practicality of consumers. It is in this context in which social and protest agendas begin to be re-signified and re-semanticized by the platforms, in order to neutralize social struggles and show themselves as leaders of a discursive universality.

In the category of “workers’ representation”, collective claims are reframed from the perspective of sacrificial citizenship, self-help, entrepreneurship and overcoming. At a certain moment, they can even pretend to be at the workers’ side, as in the statement “unjust blocking, no”. Discourses like those of a public policy director - a position aligned with neoliberal rationality and its application in urban spaces - about the platform being open to workers’ demands are common in order to show themselves as reliable companies to consumers.

Workers are made invisible, represented as indebted, people with dreams, but not as workers and, mainly, as a working class. Thus, from the class composition framework (^{Cant, 2019}), platforms aim to neutralize the political composition of the working class based on their media strategies, constructing imaginaries of what ideal workers and consumers would look like, in a circuit of platform labor. This reinforces our argument that the platforms’ media strategies are a significant dimension of class struggles. If platform labor is a laboratory for class struggles, communication is at the core of these struggles.