Gibson, A.D. orcid.org/0000-0003-4602-8810, Docherty, N. orcid.org/0000-0001-5945-008X and Gillespie, T. (2023) Health and toxicity in content moderation: the discursive work of justification. Information, Communication & Society, 27 (7). pp. 1441-1457. ISSN 1369-118X
Abstract
Within academia, industry, and government, the terms ‘health’ and ‘toxicity’ are widely used to describe and justify decisions around online content and its removal. However, the meanings of these terms are assumed to be self-evident and therefore are rarely examined. This article turns a critical eye to the health and toxicity metaphor to unpack its hidden political work. We trace the metaphor through three different discourses: the historical political economy of the term, the usage by cultural elites in the last two decades, and finally through its contemporary instrumental usage by volunteer content moderators on Facebook. By linking these discourses together, we argue that the metaphor of health and toxicity serves as a means for justification and legitimacy under contemporary neoliberalized orders that typically chafe at modes of public intervention and the language of democratic statecraft. Rather than elucidating the challenges of online content, we find that the metaphor often serves to obfuscate or sidestep the hardest problems in democratic governance. This analysis therefore has practical significance for researchers, policymakers, journalists, and other speakers that publicly traffic in this discourse at large.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
Keywords: | Health; toxicity; toxic; moderation; governance |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Information School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 14 Dec 2023 14:50 |
Last Modified: | 01 Nov 2024 15:15 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Informa UK Limited |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/1369118x.2023.2291456 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:206624 |
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