The politics of badges: Reconceptualizing platform badges as verifiable identity credentials automating access to resources

Despite their ubiquity, badges have received limited attention from critical platform researchers. Adopting a helicopter view, this conceptual paper argues that badging systems are not only motivational features, as generally understood, but critical information infrastructures producing social ordering on digital platforms. Drawing from STS and social theory, the paper reconceptualizes badges as verifiable identification credentials that shape how users are known, classified, predicted and treated, often through automated systems. Using examples from the early web to the present, the analysis demonstrates that platform badges comply with the definitional characteristics and functions of traditional credentials. This reframing positions platforms’ badging as a crucial phase in the history of credentialing that can help understand future identification and decision-making practices in datafied automated societies. The paper concludes by outlining potential implications of the changing materiality of credentials and opening new avenues for empirical research.