The discursive flexibility of changecraft: Platform change discourse in Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and X

Social media platforms evolve rapidly. While platform studies have often analyzed specific policy or feature changes, there remains a lack of shared language to conceptualize how platforms themselves represent such changes. In this article, we analyze public communications from Meta, YouTube, X, and TikTok to examine how platforms construct and justify change. We explicate platform evolution as a technical but also deeply discursive process. Platforms frame their transformations in interesting ways, especially if these shifts consolidate power or deepen user dependence. We introduce the concept of changecraft : the strategic discursive practices through which platforms manage, legitimize, and normalize change. Changecraft encompasses the rendering of infrastructural shifts as visible, the framing of ideological pivots as continuity, and the deployment of patchworked updates to subtly reorient platform futures. This framework provides scholars a way to interrogate platform change not just by what changes but by how platforms seek to make change meaningful and acceptable to their publics.