Unpacking Content Moderation: The Rise of Social Media Platforms as Online Civil Courts

The Emotional and Financial Impact of De-Platforming on Creators at the Margins

“…Different social networks share similar community guidelines, banning content that is often already prohibited by the criminal law of most countries (Goanta & Ortolani, 2021). Yet, platforms have been known to over-censor content they found legal but potentially objectionable, with a set of repercussions on users' freedom of expression (Goanta & Ortolani, 2021;Kaye, 2019).…”

“…Different social networks share similar community guidelines, banning content that is often already prohibited by the criminal law of most countries (Goanta & Ortolani, 2021). Yet, platforms have been known to over-censor content they found legal but potentially objectionable, with a set of repercussions on users' freedom of expression (Goanta & Ortolani, 2021;Kaye, 2019). This conservative approach to censorship has been linked to platforms' wish to protect their commercial interests by being overzealous in following recent legislation (Are & Paasonen, 2021;Blunt & Stardust, 2021;Blunt & Wolf, 2020;Nolan-Brown, 2022;Tiideberg & van der Nagel, 2020).…”

The assemblages of flagging and de-platforming against marginalised content creators

“…Since content moderation takes place in a complex ecosystem of policies, algorithmic recommender and demotion systems, automated detection tools and human enforcement (Bishop, 2019;Diaz and Hecht-Felella, 2021;Goanta and Ortolani, 2021), I frame flagging and deplatforming as moderation assemblages, or 'the logics, processes and outcomes of social media content moderation' (Gerrard and Thornham, 2020Thornham, : 1279Thornham, -1280, particularly when discussing how they come together to perpetrate online abuse and reinforce offline inequalities against marginalised groups. Used by Gerrard and Thornham (2020) to conceptualise how different elements in platform governance come together to perpetrate sexism, assemblages are the human and mechanical elements joining forces to generate specific results.…”

“…Flagging is an affordance 'for reporting offensive content to a social media platform' for it to be de-platformed (Crawford and Gillespie, 2016: 411). Similarly to affordances such as liking or commenting, it is a means social media and internet platforms offer users to take action (Graves, 2007) in this case, to share feedback about the content Instagram and TikTok show their audiences (Goanta and Ortolani, 2021).…”

“…On TikTok, too, reports seem to have influenced the censorship of specific accounts, particularly within the sex-positive, LGBTQIA+ and activist space (see Perrett, 2021;Stokel-Walker, 2022), Similarly to how liking and commenting may determine the popularity of content and profiles (Glatt, 2022), flagging therefore has an element of power on Instagram and TikTok. It allows social networks to evade liability and to appear to be conferring power to audiences, potentially handing the already automated reins of platform governance to those who game the system to harass others Goanta and Ortolani, 2021). The misuse or malicious exploitation of flagging has therefore also been defined as organised flagging (Crawford and Gillespie, 2016), user-generated censorship (Peterson, 2013) and user-generated warfare (UGW) (Fiore-Silfvast, 2012).…”