Raging Against the Machine: Network Gatekeeping and Collective Action on Social Media Platforms

Abstract

Social media platforms act as networked gatekeepers-by ranking, channeling, promoting, censoring, and deleting content they hold power to facilitate or hinder information flows. One of the mechanisms they use is content moderation, or the enforcement of which content is allowed or disallowed on the platform. Though content moderation relies on users' labor to identify content to delete, users have little capacity to influence content policies or enforcement. Despite this, some social media users are turning to collective action campaigns, redirecting information flows by subverting the activities of moderators, raising the visibility of otherwise hidden moderation practices, and organizing constituencies in opposition to content policies. Drawing on the example of the campaign to change Facebook's nudity policy, this paper examines the strategies and tactics of users turning to collective action, considering which factors are most influential in determining the success or failure of a campaign. It finds that network gatekeeping salience is a good model for assessing which collective action efforts are most likely to be effective in achieving individual user goals. This indicates that the users who are already most able to harness the attention economy of social media platforms are more likely to successfully navigate the content moderation process. The analysis concludes by attending to what users might learn from the dynamics of network gatekeeping as they seek to resist the asymmetrical power relations of platforms.

Tech Giants, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Journalism

“…Nor is this something necessarily new. Merrit Roe Smith argues that the belief in technological determinism dates back to the industrial revolution at least, an assumption whose European roots grew more deeply in America so that by the early twentieth century, advertisers and industrialists "quickly mastered the idea of the technological fix" 33 The folly of Zuckerberg's particular technological fix in the light of the presidential election of 2016 will be the subject of a later chapter, but it is also worth commenting on that he suffers from this misconception of technology as separate to society, to history, as something outside which operates on culture and human behaviour, the billiard ball which can ricochet us into the right pocket if only we can control the levers of that technology. As Nicholas Carr correctly observes, Zuckerberg can only entertain the notion of a planetary community because he fundamentally misunderstands what community means, that communities nearly always comprise groups of individuals who have found a way to get along despite sometimes fundamental differences of opinion and belief, or which, as in the case of religious communities, may be oppositional to the communities in which they find themselves.…”

“…As Fortunati and O'Sullivan observe, print newspapers have come to be seen as the "weakest layer" in the network of personal media, which has important consequences for social participation and sustainable social change. 33 The impact of digital technologies on legacy news media, whether the web or mobile, has been well-documented over the past decade or more. The Pew Research Center data previously reported that between 2003 and 2014, circulation numbers in the United States were down 27 per cent, with a 35 per cent decline in reporters.…”

“…32 More recent work, such as that by Myers West, and Welbers and Opgenhaffen, extends Shoemaker's and Vos's field theory approach. Myers West demonstrates how, by ranking, channelling, promoting, and deleting posts, social media sites such as Facebook act as networked gatekeepers, 33 and we shall explore an extended case study of such activity in the final chapter of this book when turning to the role of big tech in suppressing Infowars. Welbers and Opgenhaffen concentrate on the significance of Facebook in particular for news sites, offering as it does one of the most important means today for them to connect with an audience: by mapping shares and likes as part of the engagement with a story, they are able to demonstrate how social media is able to boost the diffusion of that story, although they still tend to treat Facebook as a fairly transparent medium for transmission of information across the network.…”

“…This semi-structural approach to the production of news had been taken a stage further in Galtung's and Ruge's 1965 paper on the structure of foreign news, 31 which produced a famous list for classifying the newsworthiness of events that is much debated and even frequently used today, for example Harcup and O'Neill 32 and Joye, Henrich, and Woehlert. 33 Such structuralist and organisational approaches to the production and dissemination of the news by people remain important, as when Moon and Hadley discuss the routinisation of Twitter as a source for gathering stories 34 or Hartley demonstrates how Danish breaking news is regularly categorised. 35 While the responses of Trump may be less easily predictable than former presidents, even to the extent that White House press briefings have taken a very different form since his inauguration in 2017, nonetheless there remains a press corps attached to the White House, with prescheduled events occurring even if it is not always clear what will be said or done in advance.…”

“…32 The speed with which the ban took place and its extent astonished many commentators, with social media observers generally (and wrongly) attributing it to an assault on the First Amendment and failing to realise that while even hate speech is protected from being abridged by the government, private companies are not necessarily bound by its regulation. 33 Within days, the majority of platforms had followed suit -with the notable exception of Twitter, which attracted considerable attention for its attention not to ban both Jones and Infowars as they had with other figures such as Milo Yiannopoulis and Paul Golding. Jack Dorsey issued a statement noting that Jones had not violated Twitter's terms of service, and it later transpired that the same conditions applied at Apple, where hate speech was prohibited in the terms of service for podcasts but not for apps, leading the Infowars app to trend in the news charts in the days following the ban.…”