The latest example of the digital accessibility promise: Sora and Freemium

OpenAI announced its new social media application, Sora, in September 2025. This application was designed as a TikTok-like platform focused on short videos with a vertical video feed generated entirely by artificial intelligence (AI). Users can create and share videos up to 10 seconds long using text-based prompts. Physics simulation and multi-scene continuity stand out in the visuals. It is possible to use the same character in different environments and locations. 

The application, which launched in the US and Canada in September 2025, is invitation-based and reached number 1 on the App Store with 164,000+ downloads in the first 2 days. While Android and global access are being planned, its API has been opened for developers. In this platform ecosystem, sending invitations means empowering the complements that strengthen the platform owners. Competing with Meta's Vibes, Google's YouTube integration, and TikTok's AI tools, Sora aims to gain a competitive advantage in the US amidst the uncertainty surrounding TikTok. Criticisms that AI will fill social media with low-quality content, deepfakes, copyright issues, and the potential for user addiction are seen as the risks of Sora.

With OpenAI's launch of the Sora application, GPU costs, credits, copyright crises, and unauthorized digital copies of celebrities have been discussed worldwide. OpenAI's initial "opt-out" policy regarding copyrighted characters, followed by a retreat after backlash, is one example of this. As highlighted in reports by PC Gamer and Forbes, humorous but problematic Sora videos showed that copyrighted characters could be produced in an uncontrolled manner. Similarly, OpenAI's suspension of AI-generated images of Martin Luther King Jr. after they were described by his family as "disrespectful and manipulative" also received extensive coverage in The New York Post. This situation caused the company to rapidly change its "we only block if rights holders request it" approach. In the debates created by Sora, the distinction between paid and free users is also evident. Premium users can manipulate copyrighted or sensitive figures with more powerful tools.

What has happened in recent weeks shows something else: Cultural production is also being divided according to the freemium logic. The freemium logic on platforms is repeating itself in Sora. In freemium models, platforms aim to increase advertising revenue by building a broad base, ensure that free users constantly produce data, and attract premium users through network effects. Free users create the platform's algorithmic experimental field by testing different genres with a limited number of production rights, experimenting with the limits of the system, and producing failed examples to provide feedback. Premium users, on the other hand, have the right to cleaner, faster, and higher-quality production. Sora's powerful features such as consistent character generation, physical simulation, and voice dialogue have been optimized especially for premium users.

At a superficial glance, content creativity seems accessible with AI technology. However, what has happened in recent weeks requires us to rethink the discourse of accessibility. For example, OpenAI initially highlighted a "generous free usage" discourse; it switched to a paid model in a short time due to GPU costs and commercial sustainability justifications. In a report by Business Insider, OpenAI executives clearly stated this by saying, "It was technically impossible for Sora to remain unlimited and free." The statements confirm that accessibility in the freemium trap is a promise, and inequality is an architecture.

When we consider it with the Sora example, it is seen that the freemium revenue model, which hides the fundamental contradiction of the platform economy, pretends to open the door to everyone, and then creates a digital class with the economic barriers it establishes in a platform and digital ecosystem where the winner takes all through network effects. While the freemium model, which works with network effects, is dependent on free users, the experience of free users is limited, their visibility is low, and their production capacities are restricted. The free user produces data, the premium user is protected from the data. Moreover, while free users provide constant data for the improvement of the model, premium users consume the actual benefits of this improvement. In other words, while the data burden of the platform is on the backs of free users, premium users leave less data and are more protected from advertising and redirection pressure.

While Sora's free users can only produce a few seconds of video, premium users have access to minutes, clarity, and the luxury of speed. You produce content as good and as long as your purchasing power allows. In the class-based nature of creativity within the freemium trap, who can create qualified digital characters and who can produce long stories depends on purchasing power. In other words, access to the tools of cultural production is hidden behind a paid subscription.

The advertiser, audience, and publisher relationship, which Dallas Smythe, who conducted critical political-economy studies on television in the 1970s, grounded by saying "the audience is the commodity and if you are using it for free, you are the product," continues in the freemium model as well. The internal intelligence of the system, where the free user does not feel deprived, is built on making inequality invisible. Users begin to see their limited access as a "gift." In reality, the biggest component that increases the value of the platform is the data and content density created by free users. In this context, while the freemium model of Sora and other content production and sharing platforms is a pricing preference, it will ensure that digital inequality increases by normalizing it. Today, the discourse that "everyone can produce content" is not true. Because inequality is placed silently, without showing itself as an open hierarchy. Due to the nature of the platform economy and ecosystem, not everyone can produce content under equal conditions, and they will not be able to. Therefore, the use of the "revolution in creativity, democratization, and accessibility" discourse by global technology companies as a marketing tool is an effort to make inequality invisible. This is where the appeal of freemium lies in the regulation of the digital space with a new class architecture. Freemium does not expand access; it thins, hides, and deepens inequality. OpenAI Sora is the brightest and latest face of this.

New payment and platform models that draw the boundaries of access to cultural production, and the question of who holds control over cultural production, should be addressed through the relationship between AI and platforms. Because global technology and platform companies determine the economic thresholds that define who can fully benefit from the "revolution in creativity" brought by AI. With the marriage of platforms and AI, freemium ceases to be just a revenue model and turns into a mechanism that determines the structure of digital culture. Free usage provides participation; premium provides cultural power. Participation is for everyone, power is for those who can pay. In this context, the excitement Sora provides is only as good as the answer to the question of who it is for and how accessible it is. If the boundaries of digital creation are determined according to paid tiers, equality is already damaged from the very first step. In fact, with the paradoxical situation, as accessibility increases, inequality also increases. In short, Sora and the freemium model not only blur the line between "participation" and "data exploitation" but also establish a hierarchical order in all layers of the digital experience.

On the other hand, among the ways proposed to solve the trap in this structure, models such as platform cooperativism, data minimization, user-data ownership, and public digital infrastructures stand out. It is unknown how much these proposals will produce solutions in today's world system, but as creativity developed with AI is normalized by platforms and monetized through freemium payment systems, will we really believe that we are free and equal in cultural production and creativity? Is AI really a liberating creative tool? Or is it a new economic norm where production capacity is determined by paywalls?