Content moderation: Social media’s sexist assemblages

Abstract

This article proposes ‘sexist assemblages’ as a way of understanding how the human and mechanical elements that make up social media content moderation assemble to perpetuate normative gender roles, particularly white femininities, and to police content related to women and their bodies. It investigates sexist assemblages through three of many potential elements: (1) the normatively gendered content presented to users through in-platform keyword and hashtag searches; (2) social media platforms’ community guidelines, which lay out platforms’ codes of conduct and reveal biases and subjectivities and (3) the over-simplification of gender identities that is necessary to algorithmically recommend content to users as they move through platforms. By the time the reader finds this article, the elements of the assemblages we identify might have shifted, but we hope the framework remains useful for those aiming to understand the relationship between content moderation and long-standing forms of inequality.

Disproportionate Removals and Differing Content Moderation Experiences for Conservative, Transgender, and Black Social Media Users: Marginalization and Moderation Gray Areas

“…Assemblages, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari [21] and Bucher [10], refers to social media platforms' dynamic and complex content moderation processes which bring together multiple elements, including both algorithmic and human techniques, to impose policy. Gerrard and Thornham [41] posited that similar silencing likely also occurs for other marginalized social media users, and our work provides evidence for this claim and describes how trans and Black people experience such anti-trans and racist assemblages. While conservatives also experience silencing and perceive anti-conservative bias on social media sites, there is a vast diference between silencing conservatives' misinformation and hate speech and silencing trans and Black users' personal identity-related content.…”

“…Our results provide empirical evidence for some of the ways social media content moderation silences marginalized groups like Black and trans people. Gerrard and Thornham [41] described social media platforms' prescriptive power in a feminist context by introducing the concept of 'sexist assemblages,' which describes how social media content moderation "perpetuate[s] normative gender roles, particularly white femininities, and police[s] content related to women and their bodies." Assemblages, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari [21] and Bucher [10], refers to social media platforms' dynamic and complex content moderation processes which bring together multiple elements, including both algorithmic and human techniques, to impose policy.…”

'Censorship-free' platforms: Evaluating content moderation policies and practices of alternative social media

“…While we acknowledge there are benefits to content moderation in some scenarios, such as removing hate speech, there are also concerns such practices present. For example, content moderation has been shown to perpetuate systems of sexism (Gerrard & Thornham, 2020). Such biases are also prevalent when these systems are automated, as these systems perpetuate the viewpoints of their trainers, which represent a nonrepresentative subset of viewpoints on the contested norms of what is appropriate content for the platform (Binns et al, 2017;Gillespie, 2020).…”

Scholarly research and user‐centred policy design

“…It is also important to continually highlight that while this is happening in the media and communication space, particularly in the social media space, it is representative of how policymaking should be undertaken more broadly. It is a continuing discussion between the users (Hoffmann et al, 2018), the technologies (Hutchinson, 2021), the socio-cultures (Cabalquinto & Soriano, 2020), the moderators (Gerrard & Thornham, 2020), the researchers (Gillespie et al, 2020) and the policymakers that enable good policy design and implementation.…”