Gerrard, Y. and Thornham, H. (2020) Content moderation: Social media’s sexist assemblages. New Media and Society, 22 (7). pp. 1266-1286. ISSN 1461-4448
Abstract
This paper proposes ‘sexist assemblages’ as a way of understanding how the human and mechanical elements that make up social media content moderation assemble to perpetuate normative gender roles, particularly white femininities, and to police content related to women and their bodies. It investigates sexist assemblages through three of many potential elements: (1) the normatively gendered content presented to users through inplatform keyword and hashtag searches; (2) social media platforms’ community guidelines, which lay out platforms’ codes of conduct and reveal biases and subjectivities, and (3) the over-simplification of gender identities that is necessary to algorithmically recommend content to users as they move through platforms. By the time the reader finds this paper, the elements of the assemblages we identify might have shifted (Latour, 1990), but we hope the framework remains useful for those aiming to understand the relationship between content moderation and longstanding forms of inequality.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | Algorithms; assemblage theory; content moderation; gender; Pinterest; sexism; social media |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 03 Mar 2020 12:04 |
Last Modified: | 06 May 2021 16:27 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/1461444820912540 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:157914 |