Abstract
Social media platforms govern the ways in which people communicate. But only occasionally are instances thrust into the limelight that make visible the very mechanisms at play in determining which content will go published, and which will never see the light of day. In his book Custodians of the Internet, Tarleton Gillespie, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England and adjunct associate professor at Cornell University, prods further the power of platforms and mechanisms of governance utilized by them in upholding mores for social media users—in the case of Facebook, a quarter of the world’s population.
Social media companies as private corporations are moderating content and are assuming roles as comptrollers and judiciaries of social and societal acceptability. Gillespie argues that, while the social fabric of platforms very much runs on the voluntary creation of content by users and the harvesting of user data created in this process, it is content moderation that is the unique commodity and value proposition offered by platforms. Indeed, Gillespie’s main contribution with Custodians is conceptualizing the practice of moderation as a crucial “commodity that platforms offer” (p. 13), or even more forcefully, as their determining principle.
The first chapter traces the origins of platforms to the myth of the open Internet and associated utopianism. Platforms, as articulated in the book, are understood as sociotechnical systems that are hosting community and content generated by users on infrastructures owned and maintained by platforms, and moderation is embedded as a crucial mechanism of maintenance. However, moderation itself is an oxymoron, since “rules must account for the most egregious atrocities as well as material that is questionable but defensible” (p. 11).
Gillespie discusses how platform liability in its current shape and form has evolved. Borne out of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, safe harbor regulations are imperative to understanding platforms: They codify non-liability of platforms for user-generated content hosted by them while simultaneously granting the right for platforms to interfere at will.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 delve into texts, mechanisms, and actors that play important roles in how platforms structure communication. Terms of service documents are described as tokens for legal absolution, and community guidelines as the guiding principles on anticipated uses and reprimanded behaviors. Gillespie makes the argument that these documents are indeed “discursive performances” (p. 47), which can be critiqued for whether and to what extent they may be genuine declarations or just “window dressing-performances” (p. 46).
Further into the book, he provides an overview of different groups of people who work in moderation, covering trust and safety teams which form a relatively homogeneous group of “white, largely young, tech-savvy Californians” (p. 119), crowd workers, or flaggers, to name a few. A key section of Custodians provides empirical evidence for a particularly contested topic in content moderation. With breastfeeding, platforms take intricate decisions about people’s lives at an industrial scale, and as a case study, it serves as a window to discuss the role of “women’s bodies and their appropriate presentation in public, a perennial point of tension for Western debates about public propriety” (p. 144).
The finishing chapters discuss filtering and removal as powerful tools of opacity and moderation. Gillespie discusses these in the context of pornography, and the specific ways in which Tumblr/Yahoo deals with pornographic content. While at the time still allowing for its publication, it was simultaneously excluded from search. Gillespie then introduces the concept of moderation by design—as platforms offer specific features and not others, they take deliberate decisions on what content people can access.
Finally, the book provides a call to action and reasoning on how and why platforms should be held accountable. Some recommendations are trivial, while others, as is duly noted, are rather utopian (yet innovative): Suggestions include distributed tagging which, instead of necessarily leading to takedowns, could add metadata for users to decide themselves whether such content should be included for their consumption. Another rewarding idea is curated filtering (the example that Gillespie provides here is a filter run by the Southern Poverty Law Center), or portability of moderation preferences from platform to platform. On a more abstract level, the book calls for a re-emphasis of the cultural logic of platforms, swerving away from “popularity as the core proxy for engagement” (p. 201) toward more meaningful interaction and content creation, and diversity in the teams that make important decisions about content moderation.
The book is formidable in its function: It provides a primer on the power of social media platforms as multi-faceted sociotechnical apparatuses and discerns the very mechanisms by which such power is assembled—on levels of societal judgment articulated in the media, by users, but also extending its focus to covering the people working for platforms and the activities they practice to uphold the system. As such, the book strays away from providing one big empirical case study and rather discusses different levels on which content moderation affects people’s lives. Gillespie doesn’t shy away from mentioning the economic imperatives which determine the implementation of a machinery that moderates copious amounts of user-generated content but falls short in delving further into said economics. Content moderation, while technically voluntary action by social media companies, is no do-gooder action of platforms. Rather, it follows an economic imperative of creating public spaces where people spend time.
While Custodians seeks to extrapolate and include other platforms in its analysis, the book reads chiefly as an analysis of mechanisms that govern Facebook. Further nuance in future research is warranted for scholars to bridge away from (a) subsuming under the primacy of Facebook and (b) conceptualizing content moderation not from the center of power brokerage, but rather from non-Western perspectives and including different and diverse user perspectives. As the book argues, scholarship on content moderation is crucial in prodding a “thorough, public discussion about the social responsibility of platforms” (p. 206). Gillespie’s contribution is an important one in this vein.
