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1. Introduction
The proliferation of digital technologies such as mobile and cloud computing, online retail spaces, social media and networking sites has led to a rapid reshaping of organisations, markets and entire industries (e.g., Kornberger et al., 2017; Jeacle, 2017a; Arnaboldi et al., 2017a). In addition, the popularity of social media and the diffusion of digital platforms have revolutionised traditional modes of business and generated new professions. For example, ‘Influencers’ and ‘YouTubers’, as individuals who use social media and digital platforms, affect purchasing behaviour via their digital presence, and ‘Social Media Managers’ commission them as brand ambassadors in elaborate social media strategies to raise brand awareness and exposure. Within this context, there has been a growing interest in performance measurement as organisations aim to achieve predetermined goals related to their digital business strategy, marketing and social media managers endeavour to evaluate calculative and narrative information and individuals aim to evaluate digital platform content, emanate credibility and persuade others by virtue of trustworthiness to generate income. Thereby, what constitutes useful information and how different actors measure reliable and verifiable data (Arnaboldi et al., 2017a) are important but often obscured.
The need to re-conceptualise performance measurement in the digital era is evidenced by an emerging stream of research on the nexus of digital platforms, social media technologies and management accounting information. Recent accounting studies have focused on the accountability relationships and calculative practices behind TripAdvisor's rankings (Jeacle and Carter, 2011; Scott and Orlikowski, 2012), the evaluative practices behind eBay (Kornberger et al., 2017), the role of management control practices and accountability in the governance of Airbnb (Leoni and Parker, 2019; McDaid et al., 2019), the performance ratings and reviews behind the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) (Bialecki et al., 2017) and auditability on Amazon (Jeacle, 2017a). Contrary to such studies, research on performance measurement practices and digital platforms is still scarce (e.g., Bonsón and Ratkai, 2013; Agostino and Sidorova, 2017; Arnaboldi et al., 2017b) since the performance evaluation of digital platforms' outputs is often criticised as highly subjective, with user preferences and engagement being difficult to measure or even being fabricated. For example, performance measurement becomes convoluted upon suspicions of false reviews and star ratings on digital platforms such as Booking,...