Platform Power in Comparative Perspective
Often portrayed as powerful and disruptive entities, platforms seemingly always succeed in “disrupting” the economic sectors they enter and disrupting existing regulatory infrastructure. My research hopes to take a step back to consider (1) how such firms gain and mobilize power resources over time and (2) how their political playbooks work—and perhaps more importantly—fail to work in different regulatory regimes. The guiding research questions are: How does Big Tech gain and mobilize power resources across sectors and regulatory contexts over time? How do such firms attempt to legitimize their role as private governors and manufacture user and public consent? How might we theorize and analyze the back-and-forth struggles between Big Tech and other relevant social groups?
This line of inquiry runs through my solo-authored work on platform labor and a complementary body of collaborative research on the ways that state-platform dynamics facilitate and constrain Big Tech’s political playbooks as well as the evolution of platform policies (e.g., community guidelines) through a mixed-methods approach (see here for Platform Policy Watch we’ve developed and used for the analysis).
Ongoing and completed projects
“Guerilla Capitalism and the Platform Economy in Chinese Societies” (ongoing) (collaborated with Chi Kwok)
“The Politics of Platforms in China” (completed) (collaborated with Fangyu Qing)
“Archiving Platform Governance” (2022—2024) (completed) (collaborated with Chris Chao Su) (supported by Research Start-up Fund, Improvement on Competitiveness in Hiring New Faculties Funding Scheme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Selected publications
On the varieties of platform power
Qing, F., & Chan, N. K. (2026). Governing by ambiguity: Sociotechnical imaginaries of platforms in China. Policy & Internet, 18(2), e70040.
Chan, N. K., & Kwok, C. (2022). The politics of platform power in surveillance capitalism: A comparative case study of ride-hailing platforms in China and the United States. Global Media & China, 7(2), 131–150.
Chan, N. K., & Kwok, C. (2021). Guerilla capitalism and the platform economy: Governing Uber in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Information, Communication & Society, 24(6), 780–796.
On the evolution of platform policies
Su, C. C., & Chan, N. K. (2026). Assembling platform governance as private ordering in the age of generative AI: Platform interdependence in policy evolution. Information, Communication & Society, 29(6), 1929–1953.
Mao, T., Su, C. C., Chan, N. K., & Guo, L. (2025). Communicating about and through platform values: Legitimizing public expression regulation on X and Weibo 2007–2024. Social Media + Society, 11(4), 20563051251395398.
Chan, N. K., Su, C. C., & Shore, A. (2025). Shifting platform values in community guidelines: Examining the evolution of TikTok’s governance frameworks. New Media & Society, 27(2), 1127–1151.