Corporeal moderation: digital labour as affective good

Abstract

Digital labour scholars have produced insightful analyses of the unpaid, creative, affective labour performed by users on social media platforms. Meanwhile, an increasing number of scholars have been studying the hidden labour of content moderators: underpaid, contingent workers who enable the sanitised online spaces that users take for granted by removing disturbing content. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with third-party Facebook content moderators in the USA and Ireland, I argue that the case of content moderation affords us a new way of putting these approaches into conversation with one another. Specifically, I illustrate how content moderators perform affective labour -for themselves and for the platform -in ways that make possible the monetisation of users' cultural activities. In doing so, I draw attention to the human costs of maintaining user 'safety' and thus the profitability of large social media platforms.

“I’m not this Person”: Racism, content moderators, and protecting and denying voice online

“…Such alignments caused them distress and frequent encounters with racist hate speech made them doubt their own and their coworkers’ politics. By highlighting the politically fraught dimensions of moderators’ work, this article extends previous work on moderators’ well-being (Chen, 2014; Breslow, 2018; Jereza, 2021; Newton, 2019; Roberts, 2016, 2018, 2019).…”

“…sexual abuse, physical violence, bullying, harassment, and more). Many suffer from emotional and psychological distress due to viewing graphic content without adequate mental health support combined with productivity pressures (Chen, 2014;Breslow, 2018;Jereza, 2021;Newton, 2019;Roberts, 2016Roberts, , 2018Roberts, , 2019. Because moderators operationalize platform policies, they play a crucial role in platform governance: "the layers of governance relationships structuring interactions between key parties in today's platform society, including platform companies, users, advertisers, governments, and other political actors" (Gorwa, 2019: 854).…”

Special Issue Editorial Introduction: Entangling Data while Entangling Disciplines

“…Here, the ethnographic approach is pivotal to bring the people at work behind the algorithms to the forefront, beyond a conception of ar-tificial intelligence and automated decision-making as independent agents (cf. Lupton 2019;Jereza 2021;Mateescu and Elish 2019;Pink et al 2022;Seaver 2018). Finally, ethnography can be beneficial for creatively addressing the ethical concerns raised by data-driven technologies.…”