Queer women’s experiences of patchwork platform governance on Tinder, Instagram, and Vine

Abstract

Leaked documents, press coverage, and user protests have increasingly drawn attention to social media platforms’ seemingly contradictory governance practices. We investigate the governance approaches of Tinder, Instagram, and Vine through detailed analyses of each platform, using the ‘walkthrough method’ (Light, Burgess, and Duguay, 2016 The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society 20(3).), as well as interviews with their queer female users. Across these three platforms, we identify a common approach we call ‘patchwork platform governance’: one that relies on formal policies and content moderation mechanisms but pays little attention to dominant platform technocultures (including both developer cultures and cultures of use) and their sustaining architectures. Our analysis of these platforms and reported user experiences shows that formal governance measures like Terms of Service and flagging mechanisms did not protect users from harassment, discrimination, and censorship. Key components of the platforms’ architectures, including cross-platform connectivity, hashtag filtering, and algorithmic recommendation systems, reinforced these technocultures. This significantly limited queer women’s ability to participate and be visible on these platforms, as they often self-censored to avoid harassment, reduced the scope of their activities, or left the platform altogether. Based on these findings, we argue that there is a need for platforms to take more systematic approaches to governance that comprehensively consider the role of a platform’s architecture in shaping and sustaining dominant technocultures.

Content moderation: Social media’s sexist assemblages

“…Researchers have so far focussed on the human labour behind content moderation (Roberts, 2016(Roberts, , 2017b(Roberts, , 2019Carmi, 2019), social media platforms' changing responsibilities (Gillespie, 2015(Gillespie, , 2018Suzor, 2019), users' experiences of platforms' interventions (Duguay et al, 2018;Gerrard, 2018;Myers-West, 2018), and community-driven forms of moderation (Lo, 2018;Seering et al, 2019;Squirrell, 2019). Uniting this research is a focus on humans and machines, partly through the legacy of Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship (for example Wajcman, 1991;Suchman, 2007;Barad, 2009) but also because of the increasing need to understand how social norms 'leak across', to use Cheney-Lippold's term (2017:143), to content moderation processes and vice versa.…”

Tinder’s lesbian digital imaginary: Investigating (im)permeable boundaries of sexual identity on a popular dating app

“…In further exploration of such interruptions, Duguay (2019) has examined how their accumulation contributes to a sense of scarcity among WSW on Tinder. Further, Duguay et al (2018) underscore that Tinder’s policies and governance mechanisms have failed to curb the sexually aggressive behavior of predatory and deceptive users, resulting in WSW feeling unsafe and unwelcome on the app. These findings also reflect bisexual women’s encounters with men and couples on Tinder, leading Pond and Farvid (2017) to conclude that Tinder is not a queer woman-friendly space.…”

Transnational togetherness through Rela: Chinese queer women’s practices for maintaining ties with the homeland

“…In this regard, the walkthrough method is the most appropriate approach. Additionally, although the walkthrough method is relatively new, it has been deployed in several studies examining social and dating apps, such as Blued (a Chinese gay social app) (Wang, 2018) and Tinder (Duguay et al, 2018); all important stepping stones for this research. Following the ‘step-by-step observation’ technique (Light et al, 2018: 882), the technical walkthrough of Rela began from the registration and entry on the app.…”