Beyond Gamification: Platform Badges as Automated Identity Verification Credentials mediating Access to Resources

Despite their ubiquity, social media badging systems receive scant attention from digital platform researchers in media studies. Adopting a helicopter view, the paper seeks to stimulate research on badges by demonstrating that they are not simple gamified features, as generally understood, but critical infrastructures for the algorithmic governance of social interaction. Drawing from social theory, the paper reconceptualizes badges as automatable identification and verification credentials, making users predictable and governable, thus mediating identity and access to resources on a particular platform. This reconceptualization positions platforms’ badging as a crucial phase in the history of credentialing, shaping verification practices in digitized and datafied societies. The analysis of badging systems collected from secondary literature and industry sources shows how algorithmic logic has transformed badges into data-driven communicative devices. The paper concludes by discussing how platform badging practices increase the quantity, granularity, and rigidity of the individual identity attributes being certified and verified.