Table Of Content

Custodians oft hIen ternet paltfocromnst,me ondte ration, andt hhei dddeenisc iotnahsts hape soiaclm edia TarlGeiltloens pie 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, business, or promotional use. For information, please e- mail sales.press@yale. edu (U.S. offi ce) or [email protected] (U.K. offi ce). 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 napalm 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