Gerrard, Y and Thornham, H orcid.org/0000-0003-1302-6579 (2020) Content moderation: Social media’s sexist assemblages. New Media & Society, 22 (7). pp. 1266-1286. ISSN 1461-4448
Abstract
This article 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 in-platform 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 article, the elements of the assemblages we identify might have shifted, but we hope the framework remains useful for those aiming to understand the relationship between content moderation and long-standing forms of inequality.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2020. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) |
Keywords: | Algorithms; assemblage theory; content moderation; gender; Pinterest; sexism; social media |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Media & Communication (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 17 Dec 2020 13:02 |
Last Modified: | 17 Dec 2020 13:02 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/1461444820912540 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:169116 |