The Role of Information Visibility in Network Gatekeeping

Abstract

As social media platforms witness more and more contributions from participants during developing crisis events, some platforms provide affordances that support visibility for specific pieces of information. However, the design of information visibility, especially in the context of controlling information flows (through gatekeeping), may shape how participants collect and share up-to-date information in these systems. This paper looks at the field site of reddit.com through trace ethnography methods to understand how the design of reddit's platform (from algorithms to user roles) impacts the visibility of information and subsequently how participants aggregate information in response to ongoing events. Through trace ethnographic analysis, we illustrate three themes related to tensions around visibility - behavioral, structural, and relational - and show how visibility shapes the work of producing information about crises in social news sites.