Custodians of the Internet by Terleton Gillespie

2018·11.4 MB·English

by  Tarleton Gillespie

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CUSTODIANS OF THE INTERNET

CUSTODIANS OF
THE INTERNET
platforms, content moderation,
and the hidden decisions that
shape social media
tarleton gillespie
Copyright © 2018 by Tarleton Gillespie.
All rights reserved.
Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be repro-
duced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the
publishers. The Author has made this work available under the Creative
Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International Public
License (CC BY- NC- SA 4.0) (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by- nc- sa/4.0/).
An online version of this work is available; it can be accessed through the
author’s website at http://www.custodiansoftheinternet.org.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,
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Set in Minion type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017953111
ISBN 978-0-300-17313-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of
Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
All Platforms Moderate 1
CHAPTER 2
The Myth of the Neutral Platform 24
CHAPTER 3
Community Guidelines, or the Sound of No 45
CHAPTER 4
Three Imperfect Solutions to the Problem of Scale 74
CHAPTER 5
The Human Labor of Moderation 111
CHAPTER 6
Facebook, Breastfeeding, and Living in Suspension 141
CHAPTER 7
To Remove or to Filter 173
CHAPTER 8
What Platforms Are, and What They Should Be 197
NOTES 215
BIBLIOGRAPHY 253
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 275
INDEX 279

CUSTODIANS OF THE INTERNET

1
all platforms moderate
In the ideal world, I think that our job in terms of a moderating function
would be really to be able to just turn the lights on and off and sweep the
fl oors . . . but there are always the edge cases, that are gray.
—personal interview, member of content policy team, YouTube
Titled The Terror of War but more commonly known as “Napalm Girl,” the
1972 Pulitzer Prize–winning photo by Associated Press photographer Nick
Ut is perhaps the most indelible depiction of the horrors of the Vietnam
War. You’ve seen it. Several children run down a barren street fl eeing a na-
palm attack, their faces in agony, followed in the distance by Vietnamese
soldiers. The most prominent among them, Kim Phuc, naked, suffers from
napalm burns over her back, neck, and arm. The photo’s status as an
iconic image of war is why Norwegian journalist Tom Egeland included it
in a September 2016 article refl ecting on photos that changed the history
of warfare. And it was undoubtedly some combination of that graphic suf-
fering and the underage nudity that led Facebook moderators to delete
Egeland’s post.
After reposting the image and criticizing Facebook’s decision, Egeland
was suspended twice, fi rst for twenty- four hours, then for three additional
days.1 Norway’s daily newspaper Aftenposten then reported on his suspen-
sions and included the photo; Facebook moderators subsequently instruct-
ed the newspaper to remove or pixelate the photo, then went ahead and
deleted it anyway.2 The editor in chief of Aftenposten took to the newspaper’s
front page to express his outrage at Facebook’s decision, again publishing
the photo along with a statement directed at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
1