Re-humanizing the platform: Content moderators and the logic of care

Abstract

With the goal of re-humanizing discussion platform operations, this study explores the knowledge and aims of commercial content moderators by reframing their work-related ideals through the notion of the “logic of care.” In seeking to expand their professional realm by realigning users, moderators, and technical tools, moderators of discussion forums have turned to machines, ideally freeing up resources for real-time interaction between moderators and those who post. By focusing on care, the study calls for technical innovation that integrates moderators’ aims with artificial intelligence systems. Rather than acknowledging human skills and resources in terms of moderation tools and discussion culture, the current platform logic forces moderators to operate like machines. Their discontent becomes understandable within a logic that diminishes their skills and vision. The moderator is left with assessing separate posts, rather than offering a meta-perspective to the discussion, overseeing and nurturing it.

Governing with conversation culture – conditioning organizational interaction in a digital social movement

“…Discussions on moderation have focused on removing harmful content from platforms (e.g., Gillespie, 2018). Our findings pinpoint that moderation can pursue more diverse purposes and goals (also Ruckenstein & Turunen, 2019). By applying a Luhmannian framework, we conceptualized moderation practices as a form of conditioning organizational interaction (Seidl, 2005b).…”

Planetary carambolage: The evolutionary political economy of technology, nature and work

“…Attempts of understanding platform-mediated work are proliferating, building a body of heterogeneous contributions that differ in terms of defining the scope of platform-mediated work. Digital labor, for example, is a term that has been often used by critical algorithm and media scholars (Duffy and Schwartz 2018;Gillespie 2010Gillespie , 2015Gillespie , 2017Kelkar 2018;Ruckenstein and Turunen 2019). These denote an understanding akin to a cognitive capitalist reading, where platforms are the center stage for extending the spheres of surplus value extraction to everyday leisure activities (Scholz 2012;Terranova 2000).…”

Care and Scale: Decorrelative Ethics in Algorithmic Recommendation

“…Today, companies still depend on feminized and racialized "articulation work" to cover the gap between the local mess of the world and the formal aspirations of corporate action (Star and Strauss 1999). As Lilly Irani (2015) has argued, startups commonly draw their corporate boundaries to intentionally exclude "janitorial" work: a company employing a dozen engineers in a California office can present itself as "lean" and scalable, while hundreds of globally distributed ad hoc "ghost workers" (Gray and Suri 2019) do the care work of labeling training data for machine learning, cleaning up databases, or moderating posts on social media, removing offensive materials so that companies can continue to grow uninterrupted (Roberts 2019;Ruckenstein and Turunen 2019). Scalability is not an intrinsic quality of particular techniques, but rather a consequence of where project boundaries are drawn, in the service of particular visions of corporate futures.…”