Data and AI mystification: Ownership, control, and financialization in the platform

The social relation between the platform and its users is defined by engagement with digital infrastructures and the rendition of this engagement into data. User-data, however, are surrounded by regulatory and legal ambiguities as they are not accounted for as intangible assets and their ownership and control are not transparent. I investigate how platforms rectify these ambiguities to realize user-data value as codified capital through an intensive case study of two major platforms. I use qualitative content analysis (QCA) to analyze annual and earnings reports, terms of service (ToS) agreements, and internal documents from 2017 through 2023 with qualitative data analysis (QDA) software. The findings reveal the exploitation of user-data ambiguities by platforms on two fronts: the necessary relationship between user-data inputs and platform outputs, with a growing emphasis on artificial intelligence, and the ownership and control of user-data. I argue that these ambiguities are exploited by platforms in a process of mystification of user-data to investors and other political economic actors at one end and users at the other. Mystified assets are then transformed into codified capital through financialization in the platform, contributing to studies of corporate financialization and fictitious capital. The findings place the ownership and control of user-data and their relationship to platform outputs as essential to advancing data accumulation and platform financialization.