The City Multiple: Comparing Geographies of Digital Visibility across Google Maps, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok

Digital platforms have become key geospatial infrastructures through which cities are discovered, experienced, and evaluated. Whereas the extant literature has often focused on single platforms or assumed an undifferentiated platform urbanism, we know very little about how different platforms produce distinct geographies of urban visibility. To address this lacuna, we examine the spatially differentiated regimes of visibility that emerge when platforms mediate urban environments. In doing so, we distinguish between three dimensions of platforms’ geographies of digital visibility: (1) spatial inequality—how each platform distributes visibility across places; (2) spatial articulation—how platform visibilities map onto local urban geographies; and (3) spatial representation—the kinds of places and content that achieve visibility on each platform. Combining computational, geographic, and interpretive methods, we analyse how 6,682 eating and drinking establishments in Amsterdam are represented on TikTok, Instagram, Google Maps, and Facebook, and find strikingly weak correlations between their visibility on the four platforms. We find that each platform produces distinct structures of unequal visibility, with algorithmic-discovery platforms concentrating visibility more intensely than review-based systems. Neighbourhood-level analyses further show that platform-specific spatial articulations correspond to the gentrification and touristification of specific areas. Our findings contribute to the literatures on digital geography and platform urbanism by demonstrating that digital platforms generate multiple instantiations of the same city.