Case Study: “Bury until They Change Their Ways”—The Digg Patriots and/as User-Generated Censorship

The assemblages of flagging and de-platforming against marginalised content creators

“…It allows social networks to evade liability and to appear to be conferring power to audiences, potentially handing the already automated reins of platform governance to those who game the system to harass others Goanta and Ortolani, 2021). The misuse or malicious exploitation of flagging has therefore also been defined as organised flagging (Crawford and Gillespie, 2016), user-generated censorship (Peterson, 2013) and user-generated warfare (UGW) (Fiore-Silfvast, 2012). This misuse can become a form of online abuse resembling 'mass vigilantism' (Schoenebeck and Blackwell, 2021: 7), where necessary governance functionalities are coopted by malicious actors to banish users from online spaces .…”