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The boundaries of a single Internet platform rarely define the online ecosystems of political movements. The adoption of multiple platforms is motivated by differences in user affordances and the organizational outcomes that they enable. Using an affordance approach and data from four social media platforms - the leader’s Blog, Meetup.com, the members’ Forum, and Facebook.com - we characterize the structural differences within the multi- platform ecosystem of Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S), which we use to explain differences in voting in the Movement’s online 2012 primaries. We theorize that different platforms offer different degrees of visibility and associability and produce different organizational outcomes. We measure these differences using network analysis applied to users’ networks drawn from their postings and replies. We find that platforms’ boundaries influence cross-platform activity and intra-platform communication: Meetup.com and the Forum afford a higher degree of local visibility and associability, while the Blog and Facebook.com afford a higher global visibility and associability within the broader movement. Moreover, random-forest modeling of the 2012 online primaries results shows a stronger predictive power of candidates’ network centrality within Meetup.com and the Forum, both horizontally oriented platforms. Thus, the M5S ecosystem allowed the emergence of decentralization dynamics despite their coexistence with a strong top-down communication infrastructure. However, voting platform features and previous candidacy in local elections prevailed over platform activity. We conclude discussing how seemingly minor decisions in interface design can suppress decentralization efforts and foster opposite dynamics.

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