Platforms by major digital players are transforming industries, including traditionally protective fields like healthcare. In healthcare, one specific platform type, the Open Digital Feedback Platforms (ODFPs), heralded for fostering trust and improving care by enabling patients to share ratings and comments, often provoke mistrust and skepticism among doctors. Using qualitative data from 20 interviews with French doctors and their interactions on Google’s ODFP, this study conceptualizes ODFPs as a form of panopticon sousveillance—a system of where doctors are publicly observed and evaluated by the patients that they usually watch. Doctors employ three key strategies to engage with these platforms: (1) modifying their behavior to meet patient expectations, (2) responding to feedback to shape public perception, and (3) encouraging favorable patient reviews. These strategies illustrate how doctors resist and reshape the societal changes imposed by platforms, transforming platform open visibility into a feature for professional protection and personal interest. This study advances the emergence research on platforms’ organizational member resistance and call to rethink the public visibility as a platform feature that can be shape for resistance.
