Introduction
1. Other types of moderation, such as forms of self-governance and self-moderation by community members within their own communities, persist today online. Important examples of internet sites reliant on volunteer moderation by other community members include Reddit and moderators of its subforums (known as subreddits), and the editors who monitor and moderate Wikipedia on a volunteer basis. See James Grimmelmann, “The Virtues of Moderation,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 17 (2015): 42–109; and Adrienne L. Massanari, Participatory Culture, Community, and Play: Learning from Reddit, new ed. (New York: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic, 2015).
2. Mike McDowell, “How a Simple ‘Hello’ Became the First Message Sent via the Internet,” PBS NewsHour, February 9, 2015, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/internet-got-started-simple-hello.
3. Peter Kollock and Marc Smith, Communities in Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 1999); Lori Kendall, Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Kevin Edward Driscoll, “Hobbyist Inter-Networking and the Popular Internet Imaginary: Forgotten Histories of Networked Personal Computing, 1978–1998” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 2014).
4. At the time, many countries were experimenting with their own digital information systems within national borders. The story of the French Minitel videotex system is but one example. See William L. Cats-Baril and Tawfik Jelassi, “The French Videotex System Minitel: A Successful Implementation of a National Information Technology Infrastructure,” MIS Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1994): 1–20, https://doi.org/Article; Hugh Dauncy, “A Cultural Battle: French Minitel, the Internet, and the Superhighway,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 3, no. 3 (1997): 72–89; Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll, Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017).
5. Sarah T. Roberts, “Content Moderation,” in Encyclopedia of Big Data, ed. Laurie A. Schintler and Connie L. McNeely (Springer International, 2017), 1–4, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32001-4_44-1. This encyclopedia entry cites Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), and Fred Turner, “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and the Origins of Virtual Community,” Technology and Culture 46, no. 3 (2005): 485–512.
6. Northwestern University professor Jennifer S. Light, for example, saw new opportunity for feminist thought and spaces online when she wrote an essay on the topic as a graduate student in 1995, “The Digital Landscape: New Space for Women?” Gender, Place & Culture 2(2): 133–46; further, Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise, eds., Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace (Seattle: Seal Press, 1996), also held out such hope.
7. Lisa Nakamura, “Race in/for Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” Works and Days 13 (1995): 181–93; Jerry Kang, “Cyber-Race,” Harvard Law Review 113, no. 5 (2000): 1130–1208, https://doi.org/10.2307/1342340; Jessie Daniels, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
8. Julian Dibbell, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (New York: Holt, 1998).
9. Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
10. E. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012).
11. Lawrence Lessig, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic, 1999).
12. James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” Law and Contemporary Problems 66, no. 33 (2003): 33–74; James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
13. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html.
14. Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
15. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
16. Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, eds., Digital Sociologies, reprint ed. (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016); Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Joan Donovan and danah boyd, “The Case for Quarantining Extremist Ideas,” The Guardian, June 1, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/01/extremist-ideas-media-coverage-kkk; Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018); Sarah Myers West, “Censored, Suspended, Shadowbanned: User Interpretations of Content Moderation on Social Media Platforms,” New Media & Society, May 8, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818773059; danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Siva Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015).
17. Lisa Parks, “Points of Departure: The Culture of U.S. Airport Screening,” Journal of Visual Culture 6, no. 2 (2007): 183–200 (quote on 187), https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412907078559.
18. Kate Klonick, “The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech,” Harvard Law Review 131 (2018): 1598–1670; James Grimmelmann, “The Virtues of Moderation,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 17 (2015): 42–109; Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Sarah Myers West, “Censored, Suspended, Shadowbanned: User Interpretations of Content Moderation on Social Media Platforms,” New Media & Society, May 8, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818773059; Nikos Smyrnaios and Emmanuel Marty, “Profession ‘nettoyeur du net,’ ” Réseaux, no. 205 (October 10, 2017): 57–90, https://doi.org/10.3917/res.205.0057; Nora A. Draper, “Distributed Intervention: Networked Content Moderation in Anonymous Mobile Spaces,” Feminist Media Studies 0, no. 0 (April 18, 2018): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1458746; Claudia Lo (Claudia Wai Yu), “When All You Have Is a Banhammer: The Social and Communicative Work of Volunteer Moderators” (Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018), http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/117903.
1
Behind the Screen
1. Brad Stone, “Concern for Those Who Screen the Web for Barbarity,” New York Times, July 18, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html?_r=1.
2. Stone, “Concern for Those Who Screen the Web.”
3. This statistic was, at one time, available at this page: http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html; viewed April 20, 2014. It no longer appears to be publicly reported by YouTube at this page or in this way. See also Bree Brouwer, “YouTube Now Gets over 400 Hours of Content Uploaded Every Minute,” July 26, 2015, https://www.tubefilter.com/2015/07/26/youtube-400-hours-content-every-minute; Saba Hamedy, “YouTube Just Hit a Huge Milestone,” Mashable.com, February 28, 2017, https://mashable.com/2017/02/27/youtube-one-billion-hours-of-video-daily.
4. Cooper Smith, “Facebook 350 Million Photos Each Day,” Business Insider Social Media Insights (blog), September 18, 2013, https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-350-million-photos-each-day-2013-9.
5. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (London: Pluto Press, 2015); Jack Linchuan Qiu, Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Antonio A. Casilli, “Digital Labor Studies Go Global: Toward a Digital Decolonial Turn,” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 3934–54; Miriam Posner, “See No Evil,” Logic, 2018, https://logicmag.io/04-see-no-evil.
6. Taina Bucher, If . . . Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (New York: St. Martin’s, 2018); Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018); Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
7. Aad Blok, “Introduction,” International Review of Social History 48, no. S11 (2003): 5, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002085900300124X.
8. Noble, Algorithms of Oppression.
9. Miriam E. Sweeney, “The Ms. Dewey ‘Experience’: Technoculture, Gender, and Race,” in Digital Sociologies, ed. Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, reprint edition (Bristol, U.K.: Policy Press, 2016).
10. Rena Bivens, “The Gender Binary Will Not Be Deprogrammed: Ten Years of Coding Gender on Facebook,” New Media & Society 19, no. 6 (2017): 880–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815621527.
11. Andrew Norman Wilson, Workers Leaving the Googleplex on Vimeo, 2010, https://vimeo.com/15852288.
12. Kenneth Goldsmith, “The Artful Accidents of Google Books,” New Yorker Blogs (blog), December 5, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/12/the-art-of-google-book-scan.html.
13. Krissy Wilson, “The Art of Google Books,” 2011, http://theartofgooglebooks.tumblr.com.
14. Alexander Halavais, Search Engine Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2009).
15. Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017).
16. Venus Green, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880–1980 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001); and Melissa Villa-Nicholas, “Ruptures in Telecommunications: Latina and Latino Information Workers in Southern California,” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 42, no. 1 (2017): 73–97.
17. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 168.
2
Understanding Commercial Content Moderation
1. Kate Crawford and Tarleton Gillespie, “What Is a Flag For? Social Media Reporting Tools and the Vocabulary of Complaint,” New Media & Society 18, no. 3 (2016): 410–28; Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
2. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
3. Margaret M. Fleck and David A. Forsyth, “Finding Naked People,” http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/naked.html.
4. See David A. Forsyth and Jean Ponce, Computer Vision: A Modern Approach (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2011); Kenton McHenry, “Computer Vision,” presentation at the Digital Humanities High-Performance Computing Collaboratory, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, June 10, 2012.
5. Rebecca Hersher, “Laboring in the Shadows to Keep the Web Free of Child Porn,” All Things Considered, NPR, November 17, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/11/17/245829002/laboring-in-the-shadows-to-keep-the-web-free-of-child-porn.
6. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 108.
7. See M. Rodino-Colocino, “Technomadic Work: From Promotional Vision to WashTech’s Opposition,” Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation 2, no. 1 (2008): 104–16 (quote on 105).
8. Julia Angwin and Hannes Grassegger, “Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men from Hate Speech but Not Black Children,” ProPublica, June 28, 2017, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship-internal-documents-algorithms; Ariana Tobin, Madeleine Varner, and Julia Angwin, “Facebook’s Uneven Enforcement of Hate Speech Rules Allows Vile Posts to Stay Up,” ProPublica, December 28, 2017, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enforcement-hate-speech-rules-mistakes; Olivia Solon, “Underpaid and Overburdened: The Life of a Facebook Moderator,” The Guardian, May 25, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/25/facebook-moderator-underpaid-overburdened-extreme-content; Davey Alba, “Google Drops Firm Reviewing YouTube Videos,” Wired, August 4, 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/google-drops-zerochaos-for-youtube-videos/; Jamie Grierson, “ ‘No Grey Areas’: Experts Urge Facebook to Change Moderation Policies,” The Guardian, May 22, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/no-grey-areas-experts-urge-facebook-to-change-moderation-policies; Nick Hopkins, “Facebook Moderators: A Quick Guide to Their Job and Its Challenges,” The Guardian, May 21, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/21/facebook-moderators-quick-guide-job-challenges.
9. See M. J. Bidwell and F. Briscoe, “Who Contracts? Determinants of the Decision to Work as an Independent Contractor Among Information Technology Workers,” Academy of Management Journal 52, no. 6 (2009): 1148–68; A. Hyde, “Employee Organization and Employment Law in the Changing U.S. Labor Market: America Moves Toward Shorter-Time Jobs,” WP Centro Studi Di Diritto Del Lavoro Europeo, 2002, http://csdle.lex.unict.it/Archive/WP/WP%20CSDLE%20M%20DAntona/WP%20CSDLE%20M%20DAntona-INT/20120117-060027_hyde_n10-2002intpdf.pdf; Vicki Smith, Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002).
10. See https://thesocialelement.agency and https://modsquad.com. The firm has operations centers in Sacramento, California; Brooklyn, New York; and Austin, Texas, and has expanded with a U.K.-based presence.
11. See Vikas Bajaj, “Philippines Overtakes India as Hub of Call Centers,” New York Times, November 25, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/business/philippines-overtakes-india-as-hub-of-call-centers.html?_r=1&emc=eta1.
12. See Kiran Mirchandani, Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 2012); Enda Brophy, Language Put to Work: The Making of the Global Call Centre Workforce (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
13. See Brett Caraway, “Online Labour Markets: An Inquiry into ODesk Providers,” Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation 4, no. 2 (2010): 111–25.
14. Amazon Mechanical Turk, “FAQs Overview,” https://www.mturk.com/mturk/help?helpPage=overview#what_is_hit.
15. See Amazon Mechanical Turk, “FAQs Overview.”
16. Greig de Peuter, “Creative Economy and Labor Precarity: A Contested Convergence,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 35, no. 4 (2011): 417–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859911416362.
17. See Jamie Woodcock, Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centers, reprint ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2016); Ayhan Aytes, “Return of the Crowds: Mechanical Turk and Neoliberal States of Exception,” in Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, ed. Trebor Scholz, 79–97 (New York: Routledge, 2012); Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis, “Demographics of Mechanical Turk,” 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1585030; Lilly C. Irani and M. Silberman, “Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (April 27–May 2, 2013), 611–20; J. Ross, L. Irani, M. Silberman, A. Zaldivar, and B. Tomlinson, “Who Are the Crowdworkers?: Shifting Demographics in Mechanical Turk,” in Proceedings of the 28th International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (April 10–15, 2010), 2863–72. doi: 10.1145/1753846.1753873.
18. Ross et al., “Who Are the Crowdworkers?”
19. See Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic, 1973), 9, 13.
20. See Marc Uri Porat, The Information Economy (Stanford, Calif.: Program in Information Technology and Telecommunications, Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Stanford University, 1976), 1–2.
21. Vincent Mosco, The Pay-Per Society: Computers and Communication in the Information Age (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1989); Herbert I. Schiller, Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500 (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1981).
22. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
23. See Manuel Castells, “An Introduction to the Information Age,” in Information Society Reader, ed. Frank Webster, 138–49 (quote on 143) (London: Routledge, 2004).
24. See National Telecommunications and Information Administration, “Falling Through the Net: A Survey of the ‘Have Nots’ in Rural and Urban America,” U.S. Department of Commerce, 1995.
25. See William H. Dutton, “Social Transformation in an Information Society: Rethinking Access to You and the World,” UNESCO Publications for the World Summit on the Information Society, 2004, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001520/152004e.pdf; Eszter Hargittai, “Weaving the Western Web: Explaining Differences in Internet Connectivity Among OECD Countries,” Telecommunications Policy 23, no. 10–11 (1999): 701–18, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0308-5961(99)00050-6; Jan van Dijk and Kenneth Hacker, “The Digital Divide as a Complex and Dynamic Phenomenon,” Information Society 19, no. 4 (2003): 315.
26. See Herbert Schiller, Information Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995); Schiller, Digital Capitalism.
27. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
28. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).
29. Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society; Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975); Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Christian Fuchs, “Class, Knowledge, and New Media,” Media, Culture & Society 32, no. 1 (2010): 141–50, doi:10.1177/0163443709350375; Christian Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet,” Information Society 26, no. 3 (2010): 179–96, doi:10.1080/01972241003712215.
30. Antonio A. Casilli, “Digital Labor Studies Go Global: Toward a Digital Decolonial Turn,” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 3934–54; Lilly Irani, “The Cultural Work of Microwork,” New Media & Society 17, no. 5 (2015): 720–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813511926; Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity, 2016); Niels van Doorn, “Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-Income Service Work in the ‘In-Demand’ Economy,” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 6 (2017): 898–914, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1294194.
31. See Aneesh Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 9.
32. See Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 63, vol. 18, no. 2 (2000): 33–58 (quote on 44).
33. See Mark Andrejevic, “Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor,” in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, 406–23 (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009); Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Hector Postigo, “Emerging Sources of Labor on the Internet: The Case of America Online Volunteers,” in Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions, 1750–2000, ed. Aad Blok and Greg Downey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 205–23; Terranova, “Free Labor”; Ergin Bulut, “Playboring in the Tester Pit: The Convergence of Precarity and the Degradation of Fun in Video Game Testing,” Television & New Media 16, no. 3 (2015): 240–58, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476414525241.
34. Fuchs, “Class, Knowledge, and New Media,” 141.
35. Fuchs, “Class, Knowledge, and New Media,” 141.
36. Ursula Huws, “Working at the Interface: Call-Centre Labour in a Global Economy,” Work Organisation, Labour, and Globalisation 3, no. 1 (2009): 1–8 (quote on 5).
37. Fuchs, “Class, Knowledge, and New Media”; Terranova, “Free Labor”; Huws, “Working at the Interface”; Ursula Holtgrewe, Jessica Longen, Hannelore Mottweiler, and Annika Schönauer, “Global or Embedded Service Work?: The (Limited) Transnationalisation of the Call-Centre Industry,” Work Organisation, Labour, and Globalisation 3, no. 1 (2009): 9–25.
38. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, “Empire@Play: Virtual Games and Global Capitalism,” CTheory, May 13, 2009, www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=608.
39. Raj Jayadev, “South Asian Workers in Silicon Valley: An Account of Work in the IT Industry,” in Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain, ed. Raqs Media Collective and Geert Lovink, 167–70 (quote on 168) (Delhi: The Sarai Collective, 2001).
40. See Brett H. Robinson, “E-Waste: An Assessment of Global Production and Environmental Impacts,” Science of the Total Environment 408, no. 2 (2009): 183–91; Charles W. Schmidt, “Unfair Trade E-Waste in Africa,” Environmental Health Perspectives 114, no. 4 (2006): A232–35; Atushi Terazono, Shinsuke Murakami, Naoya Abe, Bulent Inanc, Yuichi Moriguchi, Shin-ichi Sakai, Michikazu Kojima, Aya Yoshida, Jinhui Li, Jianxin Yang, Ming H. Wong, Amit Jain, In-Suk Kim, Genandrialine L. Peralta, Chun-Chao Lin, Thumrongrut Mungcharoen, and Eric Williams, “Current Status and Research on E-Waste Issues in Asia,” Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management 8, no. 1 (206): 1–12.
41. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism; Schiller, Digital Capitalism.
42. See Jack Linchuan Qiu, Working-Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less in Urban China (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 87.
43. Sareeta Amrute, Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press), 2016.
44. See “Farm Aid: Thirty Years of Action for Family Farmers,” FarmAid.com, https://www.farmaid.org/issues/industrial-agriculture/farm-aid-thirty-years-of-action-for-family-farmers.
45. Ohringer quoted in Todd Razor, “Caleris Poised for Hiring Spree as It Adds Clients,” Business Record, January 14, 2011, http://www.businessrecord.com/main.asp?Search=1&ArticleID=11846&SectionID=45&SubSectionID=136&S=1.
46. See Bajaj, “Philippines Overtakes India.”
47. “Outsourcing & Offshoring to the Philippines,” http://www.microsourcing.com.
48. See Castells, “An Introduction to the Information Age,” 146.
49. See Adrian Chen, “Inside Facebook’s Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where ‘Camel Toes’ Are More Offensive Than ‘Crushed Heads,’ ” Gawker, February 17, 2012, http://gawker.com/5885714/inside-facebooks-outsourced-anti+porn-and-gore-brigade-where-camel-toes-are-more-offensive-than-crushed-heads.
50. Sarah T. Roberts, “Digital Detritus: ‘Error’ and the Logic of Opacity in Social Media Content Moderation,” First Monday 23, no. 3 (2018), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/8283.
51. “Facebook’s Bizarre and Secretive ‘Graphic Content’ Policy Revealed in Leaked Document,” Daily Mail, February 21, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2104424/Facebooks-bizarre-secretive-graphic-content-policy-revealed-leaked-document.html?ito=feeds-newsxml.
52. “Abuse Standards 6.1: Operation Manual for Live Content Operators,” oDesk, 81863464-oDeskStandards.pdf, n.d., available at http://random.sh.
53. Alexei Oreskovic, “Facebook Reporting Guide Shows How Site Is Policed,” Huffington Post, June 19, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/facebook-reporting-guide_n_1610917.html#s=935139, Figure 2.6.
54. Quentin Hardy, “The Boom in Online Freelance Workers,” New York Times Bits Blog, June 13, 2012, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/the-boom-in-online-freelance-workers.
55. Qiu, Working-Class Network Society, and J. L. Qiu, Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
56. Terranova, “Free Labor,” 33.
57. L. Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); L. Suchman, “Anthropological Relocations and the Limits of Design,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40, no. 1 (2001): 1–18.
3
Screening in Silicon Valley
1. All personal names, department titles, and firm names that could identify any of the participants are pseudonyms. My interventions in transcripts are indicated by “STR.”
2. Mitali Nitish Thakor, “Algorithmic Detectives Against Child Trafficking: Data, Entrapment, and the New Global Policing Network” (Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016).
3. “Mapping San Francisco’s Rent Prices,” Zumper.com, https://www.zumper.com/blog/2016/03/mapping-san-franciscos-rent-prices-march-2016.
4. Nellie Bowles, “Dorm Living for Professionals Comes to San Francisco,” New York Times, March 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/technology/dorm-living-grown-ups-san-francisco.html.
5. Matt Kulka, “I Made 6 Figures at My Facebook Dream Job—But Couldn’t Afford Life in the Bay Area,” Vox.com, September 4, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/9/14/12892994/facebook-silicon-valley-expensive.
4
“I Call Myself a Sin-Eater”
1. Names of companies, sites, products, and participants that could be identifiable are given here as pseudonyms.
2. The scholars Winnie Poster and Kiran Mirchandani document the pressure on business process outsourcing workers dispersed throughout the Global South to mimic or take on cultural and linguistic traits of North Americans when serving those customers in phone support work. Kiran Mirchandani, Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 2012), and Winifred Poster, “Who’s on the Line? Indian Call Center Agents Pose as Americans for U.S.-Outsourced Firms,” Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society 46, no. 2 (2017): 271–304.
3. E. Sidney Hartland, “The Sin-Eater,” Folklore 3, no. 2 (1892): 145–57.
4. Suzanne LaBarre, “Why We’re Shutting Off Our Comments,” PopSci.com, September 24, 2013, http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments; and “A New Role for Comments on Chronicle.Com,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3, 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-New-Role-for-Comments-on/234701.4.
5. Ashley A. Anderson, Dominique Brossard, Dietram A. Scheufele, Michael A. Xenos, and Peter Ladwig, “The ‘Nasty Effect’: Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19, no. 3 (2014): 373–87, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12009.
5
“Modern Heroes”
1. I am indebted to Andrew Dicks for assistance and insight into this work. As in all other chapters, the names of participants and the names of companies, departments, sites, and products have been given pseudonyms to protect the workers.
2. See Vikas Bajaj, “Philippines Overtakes India as Hub of Call Centers,” New York Times, November 25, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/business/philippines-overtakes-india-as-hub-of-call-centers.html?_r=1&emc=eta1.
3. I do not wish to contribute to exotification of this part of the world: these extremes of poverty and wealth are hardly a situation confined to the so-called Global South; it can be frequently seen in what one scholar-activist described as “the overdeveloped world.” Such gross economic disparity can be found in many regions in the West, including in places like Los Angeles, where I live.
4. See Mél Hogan, “Facebook Data Storage Centers as the Archive’s Underbelly,” Television & New Media 16, no. 1 (2015): 3–18, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476413509415; Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network: Sign, Storage, Transmission (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).
5. See Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Manila: Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2004).
6. See Parks and Starosielski, Signal Traffic, 8.
7. Parks and Starosielski, Signal Traffic, 5.
8. Mél Hogan, “Data Flows and Water Woes: The Utah Data Center,” Big Data & Society 2, no. 2 (2015): 1–12; Mél Hogan and Tamara Shepherd, “Information Ownership and Materiality in an Age of Big Data Surveillance,” Journal of Information Policy 5 (2015): 6–31.
9. From http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/manilapopulation/ and the Republic of the Philippines, National Nutrition Council, website at http://www.nnc.gov.ph/index.php/regional-offices/national-capital-region/57-region-ncr-profile/244-ncr-profile.html.
10. See Gavin Shatkin, “The City and the Bottom Line: Urban Megaprojects and the Privatization of Planning in Southeast Asia,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 40, no. 2 (2008): 383–401 (quote on 384), https://doi.org/10.1068/a38439.
11. World Bank, “East Asia’s Changing Landscape: Measuring a Decade of Spatial Growth,” 2016, http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/Publications/Urban%20Development/EAP_Urban_Expansion_Overview_web.pdf.
12. See Shatkin, “The City and the Bottom Line,” 384.
13. See Rosario G. Manasan, “Export Processing Zones, Special Economic Zones: Do We Really Need to Have More of Them?” Policy Notes, Philippine Institute for Development Studies, November 2013, p. 1, http://dirp4.pids.gov.ph/webportal/CDN/PUBLICATIONS/pidspn1315.pdf.
14. Lilia B. de Lima, “Update on PEZA Activities and Programs,” AmCham Hall, Makati City, July 31, 2008, http://www.investphilippines.info/arangkada/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/PEZA-presentation.pdf.
15. The Special Economic Zone Act of 1995, Republic Act No. 7916, Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines.
16. Proclamation No. 191, s. 1999, Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines, n.d.
17. See “Corporate Profile,” Megaworld Corporation, https://www.megaworldcorp.com/investors/company/corporate-profile.
18. See Arlene Dávila, Barrio Dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and the Neoliberal City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Michael Herzfeld, Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ursula Huws, Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014); Vincent Lyon-Callo, Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance: Activist Ethnography in the Homeless Sheltering Industry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Tadiar, Fantasy-Production.
19. See Parks and Starosielski, Signal Traffic, 3.
20. Bonifacio Global City website, http://bgc.com.ph/page/history.
21. See Huws, Labor in the Global Digital Economy, 57.
22. Jan M. Padios, A Nation on the Line: Call Centers as Postcolonial Predicaments in the Philippines (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018).
23. Jan Maghinay Padios, “Listening Between the Lines: Culture, Difference, and Immaterial Labor in the Philippine Call Center Industry” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2012), 17, 18, http://search.proquest.com.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/docview/1038821783/abstract/317F9F8317834DA8PQ/1?accountid=15115.
24. Padios, A Nation on the Line.
25. For “space of flows,” see Manuel Castells, “The Space of Flows,” ch. 6 in The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed., 407–59 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
26. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.
27. Cecilia Uy-Tioco, “Overseas Filipino Workers and Text Messaging: Reinventing Transnational Mothering,” Continuum 21, no. 2 (2007): 253–65, https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310701269081.
6
Digital Humanity
1. Sarah T. Roberts, “Social Media’s Silent Filter,” The Atlantic, March 8, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/commercial-content-moderation/518796.
2. Adrian Chen, “The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed,” Wired, October 23, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation.
3. Olivia Solon, “Underpaid and Overburdened: The Life of a Facebook Moderator,” The Guardian, May 25, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/25/facebook-moderator-underpaid-overburdened-extreme-content; Jamie Grierson, “ ‘No Grey Areas’: Experts Urge Facebook to Change Moderation Policies,” The Guardian, May 22, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/no-grey-areas-experts-urge-facebook-to-change-moderation-policies; Nick Hopkins, “Facebook Moderators: A Quick Guide to Their Job and Its Challenges,” The Guardian, May 21, 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/21/facebook-moderators-quick-guide-job-challenges; Julia Angwin and Hannes Grassegger, “Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men . . .,” ProPublica, June 28, 2017, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship-internal-documents-algorithms; Ariana Tobin, Madeleine Varner, and Julia Angwin, “Facebook’s Uneven Enforcement of Hate Speech Rules . . .,” ProPublica, December 28, 2017, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enforcement-hate-speech-rules-mistakes. Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly, “The Secret Rules of the Internet,” The Verge, April 13, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11387934/internet-moderator-history-youtube-facebook-reddit-censorship-free-speech; Till Krause and Hannes Grassegger, “Inside Facebook,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, December 15, 2016, http://international.sueddeutsche.de/post/154513473995/inside-facebook.
4. April Glaser, “Want a Terrible Job? Facebook and Google May Be Hiring,” Slate, January 18, 2018, https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/facebook-and-google-are-building-an-army-of-content-moderators-for-2018.html.
5. The website for All Things in Moderation, held at UCLA on December 6–7, 2017, includes links to the full schedule, guest posts by participants and others, and links to videos of some of the plenaries and keynotes. It is accessible at https://atm-ucla2017.net.
6. See the first COMO event’s website at http://law.scu.edu/event/content-moderation-removal-at-scale.
7. Betsy Woodruff, “Exclusive: Facebook Silences Rohingya Reports of Ethnic Cleansing,” Daily Beast, September 18, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-rohingya-activists-say-facebook-silences-them; Paul Mozur, “A Genocide Incited on Facebook, with Posts from Myanmar’s Military,” New York Times, October 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html.
8. Alexis C. Madrigal, “Inside Facebook’s Fast-Growing Content-Moderation Effort,” The Atlantic, February 7, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/02/what-facebook-told-insiders-about-how-it-moderates-posts/552632.
9. Hany Farid, “Reining in Online Abuses,” Technology & Innovation 19, no. 3 (2018): 593–99, https://doi.org/10.21300/19.3.2018.593.
10. “How CEP’s EGLYPH Technology Works,” Counter Extremism Project, December 8, 2016, https://www.counterextremism.com/video/how-ceps-eglyph-technology-works.
11. Farid, “Reining in Online Abuses.”
12. Technology Coalition, “The Technology Coalition—Fighting Child Sexual Exploitation Online,” 2017, http://www.technologycoalition.org.
13. Sarah T. Roberts, “Commercial Content Moderation and Worker Wellness: Challenges & Opportunities,” Techdirt, February 8, 2018, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180206/10435939168/commercial-content-moderation-worker-wellness-challenges-opportunities.shtml.
14. “Employee Resilience Guidebook for Handling Child Sexual Abuse Images,” Technology Coalition, January 2015, http://www.technologycoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/TechnologyCoalitionEmployeeResilienceGuidebookV2January2015.pdf.
15. Nick Statt, “YouTube Limits Moderators to Viewing Four Hours of Disturbing Content per Day,” The Verge, March 13, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/13/17117554/youtube-content-moderators-limit-four-hours-sxsw.
16. “CDA 230: Legislative History,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, September 18, 2012, https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history.
17. Ben Knight, “Germany Implements New Internet Hate Speech Crackdown,” DW.COM, January 1, 2018, http://www.dw.com/en/germany-implements-new-internet-hate-speech-crackdown/a-41991590.
18. Greg Hadley, “Forced to Watch Child Porn for Their Job, Microsoft Employees Developed PTSD, They Say,” McClatchy DC, January 11, 2017, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article125953194.html.
19. Steven Greenhouse, “Temp Workers at Microsoft Win Lawsuit,” New York Times, December 13, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/13/business/technology-temp-workers-at-microsoft-win-lawsuit.html.
20. Timothy B. Lee, “Ex-Facebook Moderator Sues Facebook over Exposure to Disturbing Images,” Ars Technica, September 26, 2018, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/ex-facebook-moderator-sues-facebook-over-exposure-to-disturbing-images. The text of the lawsuit as filed is available here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4936519-09-21-18-Scolav-Facebook-Complaint.html.
21. “About BIEN,” BIEN Philippines (blog), February 5, 2018, http://www.bienphilippines.com/about; and “Tech Workers Coalition,” https://techworkerscoalition.org.
22. Sarah Myers West, “Censored, Suspended, Shadowbanned: User Interpretations of Content Moderation on Social Media Platforms,” New Media & Society, May 8, 2018.
23. “Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation,” Santa Clara Principles, https://santaclaraprinciples.org/images/scp-og.png.
24. Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “ ‘The Business of War’: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon,” New York Times, July 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceopentagon-project.html; Kate Conger, “Amazon Workers Protest Rekognition Face Recognition Contracts for Police,” Gizmodo (blog), June 21, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/amazon-workers-demand-jeff-bezos-cancel-face-recognitio-1827037509.
25. Shannon Mattern, “Public In/Formation,” Places Journal, November 15, 2016, https://doi.org/10.22269/161115.
