"My other job" : volunteer content moderation as platform labor
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Volunteer content moderation has been a crucial feature of virtual discussion spaces throughout the history of the social internet. Over the last decade, global social media companies have built out the infrastructure for volunteers to administer their own groups and communities. The social media platform Facebook, for example, reported that as of 2020, 70 million volunteers moderate discussion groups regularly used by 1.8 billion people worldwide. Despite its broad use by nearly a quarter of humanity, Facebook's structural opacity has unfortunately limited external access to conduct rigorous research of these spaces. In this dissertation, I examine volunteer moderation on Facebook from the theoretical perspective of the sociology of labor, incorporating insights from management studies and the field of communication. This research uses ethnographic methods and is designed around 41 in-depth interviews with volunteer Facebook admins and moderators who moderate groups that vary in both size and topic. I also introduce a new method for use in digital ethnography that I call over-the-shoulder observation. Analysis of these interviews, field notes, and notes from over-the-shoulder observation yielded important insights into the dynamics of Facebook-hosted group moderation, including a framework for understanding the work of moderation teams, an exploration of volunteer moderation as a route to capital accumulation, and an application of labor process theory to the moderator-platform relationship. More broadly, this dissertation reveals how volunteer moderators' work is shaped by the economics of the emerging platform ecosystem. I argue that the scholarly moderation literature must move beyond framing moderation practices simply through the lenses of normative ethics and effective user experience, and rather scholars must recognize that broader social and economic subjectivities of these actors shape how they make and understand moderation decisions.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Gibson, Anna Sophia Lentini |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Christin, Angèle |
| Thesis advisor | Christin, Angèle |
| Thesis advisor | Hancock, Jeff |
| Thesis advisor | Turner, Fred |
| Thesis advisor | Valentine, Melissa (Melissa A.) |
| Degree committee member | Hancock, Jeff |
| Degree committee member | Turner, Fred |
| Degree committee member | Valentine, Melissa (Melissa A.) |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Communication |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Anna D. Gibson. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Communication. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/hv913fz2300 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Anna Sophia Lentini Gibson
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...