10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17435
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2038-3460
17435
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Corinna Canali
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet. Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media, Yale University Press, 2018
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10
Book Reviews
2019-07-16
2023-06-26
2019-07-16
2023-10-05
140-144
TS
Corinna Canali
2019/07/16
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17435
140
Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
2038-3460
1
en
144
Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet. Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media, Yale University Press, 2018
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17435/16285
10
140                                                      Tecnoscienza – 10 (1)


   Tarleton Gillespie
Custodians of the Internet. Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hid-
den Decisions That Shape Social Media, New Haven, Yale University
Press, 2018, pp. 296

Corinna Canali Royal Academy of Art, The Hague

    Not everything posted on social media makes it to the public: some
bits of content disappear along the way and who makes them disappear
are the platforms themselves. Several times Facebook (but not only), has
been under the spotlight for taking down or allowing specific content
posted by their users. The latest episode saw Mark Zuckerberg’s main
platform removing a picture of the Venus of Willendorf, causing the out-
rage of the Naturhistorische Museum (NHM) of Vienna, where the Ve-
nus is physically located. After the episode was brought under public at-
tention, Facebook restored the post and apologised (Dawson 2018).
    Ever since they emerged from the fabric of the web 2.0, social media
companies have always presented themselves as mere conduits of content,
pushing afar every responsibility on what ended up on the spaces they
provided. But such a portrait is contradicted by the moderating systems
they apply on users.
    After the breach opened by the unprecedented studies of Sarah T.
Roberts, assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Information
Studies, revealing the logics moving complex systems of social media
moderation, Tarleton Gillespie in his book Custodians of the Internet:
Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape
Social Media, published by Yale University Press in 2018, engages in an
extensive analysis of the platforms’ thorough “governance mechanisms”,
as James Grimmelmann (2015) defined them. Gillespie, principal re-
searcher at Microsoft Research New England and veteran in a research
field that links media studies to technology and science studies (see Gil-
lespie et al. 2014), tells about moderating systems in a way social media
do not, i.e. with transparency. Kept confusing and mostly untold, such
systems are enacted with users not even noticing them and totally incapa-
ble of accessing them. Through the words of Gillespie, the encounter
with moderating mechanisms is finally made accessible and clear, brought
to its very essence.
    The book follows a rather linear path. Opening with the infamous
removal of Nick Ut’s photography known as “Napalm Girl” from several
accounts of Norwegian citizens and politicians, Gillespie, wisely unfolds
throughout his investigation, a detailed explanation of what CCM is, who
and what are its main actors and why it is a very problematic mechanism.
Revealed across eight chapters, what the author presents is a wide spec-


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Book Review                                                                141
trum of not only technical and legal features, but most of all, of the rea-
sons why the entire system of online moderation as it is now requires a
deep change.
    It is emblematic that such book begins recounting a debated removal.
Content moderation, technically defined Commercial Content Modera-
tion (CCM), is an untold and invisible system, moving platforms that in-
dependently define what is to be made public and what is not based on
doubtful logics (Roberts 2016). Hidden behind unaccessible mechanisms,
moderation is hard to spot. It reveals itself in the act of taking down user-
generated content (UCG), exposing the power enacted by platforms pro-
viders. Meaning that, unless users are posting forbidden material, they
will hardly even notice CCM at work. But this does not mean that they
are not subject to it.
    Content moderation is the infrastructure supporting and moulding
social media spaces and, as for all infrastructures, its very nature is invisi-
bility. It shows itself “upon breakdown”, meaning that it becomes visible
when it breaks (Star 1999). As Gillespie explains, despite being a funda-
mental feature infused in almost the entirety of Western-based social me-
dia platforms, it is still unknown to the majority of social media users. As
said, using platforms as commanded by their regulating norms, users nev-
er encounter moderation at all. And those who do, are the ones that, act-
ing against its commands, get cut out, silenced or, borrowing social media
logos, banned.
    “Custodians of the Internet” not only engages in an in-depth explana-
tion of the system itself: it points out the various issues it generates. Every
infrastructure unfolds specific narrations (Star 1999), and so does moder-
ation. The core action of CCM is to allow or forbid pieces of content.
And the judgment shapes what the platform is and what it is not. The list
of prohibitions, entirely decided by the private companies owning such
platform, changes at will, and empowers tech companies on deciding to
set rules along the way.
    In the first and second chapters, Gillespie presents evidence of both
the inherited non-neutrality of social media platforms and the wider
struggles to regulate the Internet that, already in the first 1990s, saw law-
makers and Internet connoisseurs facing the dilemma of setting bounda-
ries to online activity without jeopardising users’ freedom of expression.
The norms regulating UCG are key elements in CCM systems and the
third chapter focuses on their role. Presenting as case-studies analyses of
snippets taken from guidelines regulating various platforms, Gillespie
demonstrates the reasons moving them, how they are constructed and
what are the similarities between different platform providers moved by
similar motives.
    And if so far the problematic aspects were only starting to surface,
from the fourth chapter on Gillespie engages in a deeper explanation of
the issues surrounding and emerging from attempts at moderating global


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142                                                        Tecnoscienza – 10 (1)

scale content. Starting from how both traditional and social media decide
to moderate content, the fourth chapter presents forms of moderation
and their interconnected issues. Shifting to the fundamental human la-
bour shaping CCM, the fifth chapter analyses how moderators are trained
and the working conditions they face. Furthermore, Gillespie questions
the fairness of a global scale moderation managed by a small specific
group of individuals mainly based in the Silicon Valley area.
    Fairness concerns come back when, in the sixth chapter, the author
moves from an analysis tackled from the perspective of platforms and
their managers to the users’ one. Presenting both (in)famous and less
known evidence of how social media moderation can become a tool for
discrimination, in this section the author wisely confronts female objecti-
fication and gender discrimination enforced through moderating systems.
Using it to prove the tensions that arise when users confront platforms
policies they can hardly appeal. Tensions that expose the total discretion
of the platform on what/why/how to regulate. Gillespie uncovers the sub-
jectiveness moving policies using as an example how Facebook, only after
a long set of public contestations, tweaked its female nudity rules shifting
from an absolute ban of depictions of female breasts to allowing them in
restricted specific cases (e.g. breastfeeding).
    The final two chapters begin presenting possible solutions to the
problem, with the seventh chapter focussing on the question whether it is
better to remove content or rather filter and hide it, giving actual exam-
ples of both approaches. Note that the book uses Tumblr policy as an ex-
ample of alternative moderating systems, where adult content was filtered
instead of removed altogether. But, by the time it was published, the plat-
form’s permissive policy was replaced by a stricter and more conformed
one a few months after the enactment of the “Stop Enabling Sex Traf-
fickers Act” (SESTA) and “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex
Trafficking Act” (FOSTA) regulation (see Romano 2018).
    The last chapter explicitly looks at the nature of tech companies
providing social media spaces, questioning the liberties that Western so-
cieties have allowed them and including the users’ responsibility towards
such allowance. The conclusory part of Gillespie’s analysis presents de-
tailed possibilities to improve social media starting from how, what and
why they should moderate challenging how social media companies have
positioned themselves both on- and offline.
    Gillespie, through his attentive analysis, warns us of the dangers of
such empowerment when he tells that our public culture is, in important
ways, shaped and designed by the platforms we access. When the en-
counter user-technology happens, is the latter that pulls the strings. Users
are constantly re-configured and educated, pushed into tight boundaries
designed to preserve the perfected version of reality infused in the ma-
chine (Woolgar 1991). Whoever fails at conforming, is banned and si-
lenced. And if users are the raw material to be (re)configured, norms are


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Book Review                                                                   143
the mould. Such massively frequented spaces are the tools used to “nor-
matise” humans, through prototypical structures affecting all the non-
conformed ones (Browne 2015).
     Custodians of the Internet explains why we, active or inactive users,
should question the promised impartiality of such powerful sites. Moder-
ation, in this investigation, turns out to be not only an optional feature
relegated to a few strict social media platforms. It is the central value
proposition for all of them. Their very commodity subtly based on and
used to shape users’ engagement and participation, attracting or repelling
investors accordingly.
     Moderation is the core feature of online social networks and we
should demand for transparency in the system. Designing systems to
moderate user-generated material is social media companies’ main occu-
pation––only at Facebook, Inc. it involves some 30.000 individuals, half
of which are moderators. Furthermore, users should engage in under-
standing and questioning such systems as they are actively part of it. As
Custodians of the Internet explains, the “custodians” are not just (under-
paid and unprotected) moderators directly or indirectly hired by compa-
nies. Anyone accessing and using these spaces is part of the process.
     Step-by-step, Gillespie outlines a detailed and intelligent path through
mechanisms of CCM gathering information from existing literature and
filling the gaps in such pre-existing information enforcing his argument
introducing evidence gathering news material, interviews and one-to-one
conversations with the individuals shaping and enacting moderation. This
is surely a necessary book to read, as the role of social media companies
within social constructs becomes more and more controversial and de-
bated. What Gillespie does, is a promising starting point to eventually
access a structure that is, so far, kept out of view.


References

Browne, S. (2015) Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness. Durham, NC,
      Duke University Press.
Dawson, A. (2018) Facebook Censors 30,000 Year-old Venus of Willendorf as
      'pornographic', in “The Art Newspaper”, August 09, 2018, in
      https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/facebook-censors-famous-30-
      000-year-old-nude-statue-as-pornographic (retrieved March 18, 2019)
Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J. and Foot, K. A., (eds.) (2014) Media Technologies.
        Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, Cambridge MA, MIT
        Press.
Grimmelmann, J. (2015) The Virtues of Moderation, in “Yale Journal of Law and
     Technology”, 17 (1), pp. 43-109.
Roberts, S. T. (2016) “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty

                                                                             143
144                                                              Tecnoscienza – 10 (1)

       Work, in S. U. Noble and B. M., Tynes B. M. (eds.) The Intersectional In-
       ternet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online, New York, NY, Peter Lang,
       pp. 147-59
Romano, A. (2018) A New Law Intended to Curb Sex Trafficking Threatens the
     Future of the Internet as We Know It, in “Vox”, July 02, 2018, in
     https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/4/13/17172762/fosta-sesta-backpage-
     230-internet-freedom (retrieved February 13, 2019).
Star, S. L. (1999) The ethnography of infrastructure, in “American behavioural
        scientist”, 43 (3), pp. 377-391.
Woolgar, S. (1990) Configuring the user: the case of usability trials, in “The Soci-
      ological Review”, 38 (1), pp. 58-99.




                                       ***

Andreas Metzner-Szigeth (ed.)
Zukunftsfähige Entwicklung und generative Organisationskulturen: – Wie
wir Systeme anders wahrnehmen und Veränderung gestalten können,
[Sustainable development and generative organisational cultures: How
we may perceive systems differently and design change], Munich,
Oekom, 2018, pp. 256

Cornelius Schubert Universität Siegen

    This edited volume situates itself in the large, if not immense, domain
of sustainability research and asks how change might be initiated, espe-
cially with respect to artistic interventions in organisational/entrepreneur-
rial settings. It also focuses on a specific aspect of sustainability, namely
creating novel and durable arrangements for addressing the pressing chal-
lenges of our times, by dividing the term sustainability into two compo-
nents: renewability in terms of conserving resources (“Nachhaltigkeit”)
and future viability in terms of creating enduring solutions (“Zukun-
ftsfähigkeit”). In a nutshell, the book traces the possibilities of artistic in-
terventions in order to create durable organisational changes with respect
to sustainability goals such as health, equality or energy. It does so by
zooming into this subject area through 15 chapters from 17 contributors.
The first part of the book outlines the future viability of current societies
on a broader scale. The second part questions in how far “generative or-
ganisational cultures” hold promising futures. The third part then collects
examples where interventions from art or psychology have initiated dura-


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