Publication | Open Access
Digital detritus: 'Error' and the logic of opacity in social media content moderation
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2018
Year
Digital SocietyEmerging MediaSocial InfluenceContent CreationPublic OpinionCommunicationMedia StudiesSocial SciencesCensorshipSocial MediaMedia ActivismMedia RegulationSocial Medium NewsPolitical CommunicationProcedural OpacityContent AnalysisMedia InstitutionsMedia CensorshipArtsUser-generated ContentMedia DistributionProblematic Social Medium UseDigital DetritusDigital MediaMedia PoliciesSocial ComputingPolitical CampaignsContent ModerationLate 2016Media LawsPolitical Science
Social media platforms enforce content moderation through opaque, nebulous rules that create user confusion and are already heavily regulated, yet these regulations rarely satisfy all stakeholders. This paper examines the 2016 Facebook controversy over “The Terror of War” to develop a framework for understanding how commercial content moderation shapes political and economic outcomes. The authors introduce the concept of an operating logic of opacity, where obfuscation and secrecy jointly shape how platforms decide what content remains or is removed. The study finds that platforms prioritize content as a revenue commodity, reducing moderation decisions to commercial value, which yields online spaces that reinforce existing power structures rather than challenge them.
The late 2016 case of the Facebook content moderation controversy over the infamous Vietnam-era photo, “The Terror of War,” is examined in this paper for both its specifics, as well as a mechanism to engage in a larger discussion of the politics and economics of the content moderation of user-generated content. In the context of mainstream commercial social media platforms, obfuscation and secrecy work together to form an operating logic of opacity, a term and concept introduced in this paper. The lack of clarity around platform policies, procedures and the values that inform them lead users to wildly different interpretations of the user experience on the same site, resulting in confusion in no small part by the platforms’ own design. Platforms operationalize their content moderation practices under a complex web of nebulous rules and procedural opacity, while governments and other actors clamor for tighter controls on some material, and other members of civil society demand greater freedoms for online expression. Few parties acknowledge the fact that mainstream social media platforms are already highly regulated, albeit rarely in such a way that can be satisfactory to all. The final turn in the paper connects the functions of the commercial content moderation process on social media platforms like Facebook to their output, being either the content that appears on a site, or content that is rescinded: digital detritus. While meaning and intent of user-generated content may often be imagined to be the most important factors by which content is evaluated for a site, this paper argues that its value to the platform as a potentially revenue-generating commodity is actually the key criterion and the one to which all moderation decisions are ultimately reduced. The result is commercialized online spaces that have far less to offer in terms of political and democratic challenge to the status quo and which, in fact, may serve to reify and consolidate power rather than confront it.