Hi network! Let’s talk about Sarah Roberts today, a US assistant professor at the University of California, teaching Gender Studies, Information Studies and Labor Studies (https://lnkd.in/ed6A_R2h). She has specialized in studying commercial content moderation and social media. She even worked as a researcher for Twitter last year! (I would say that, indeed, they could use some help to improve their content moderation, but that’s probably not the worst of this company, if you know what I mean.) Today, I would like to present her book, Behind the screen: content moderation in the shadows of social media, Yale University Press, 2019. (Chers collègues, le livre est disponible en français sur Cairn; vous n’avez aucune raison de ne pas le lire.)
Why would I recommend this book? Because she focuses on the workers. Content moderation is not only managed by machines. But when studying online ecosystems from a labor law perspective, I feel like French scholars limit themselves to intermediated workers, like Uber drivers or UberEat riders. The scholar debate is mostly around the qualification of their work: Are they employees or self-employees? When studying international value chains, I feel like the debate is usually limited to non-digital companies, such as Adidas, H&M, etc. We study the poor conditions of work (or the exploitation) of people abroad in their factories, and we call for the due diligence of companies. But there is a gap between these two topics: We barely talk about the downstream value chain of digital actors, particularly the work they pay for abroad for content moderation. Differently said, our peace of mind when surfing online is granted by people, often from the Global South, often working in exploitative conditions. That is the goal of Roberts’ book: “to counter that invisibility and to put these workers and the work they do front of mind” (p. 3).
This work is needed due to the main role of moderators in our online lives and in the development of digital actors: Moderators “are intermediaries who negotiate an internet defined in the terms discussed here; they manipulate and referee (frequently in secret) user-generated content in social media platforms to the end of creating spaces that are more palatable, accessible, and inviting, and that elicit more user participation. They do so for money, and they do so in terms of the goals and benefits of the companies that engage their services. While a better user experience may be an outcome of the work they do, this is always, and ultimately, because that better experience benefits the company providing the space for participation online.” (p. 32).
A big plus of the book is the table with the taxonomy of online content moderation labor arrangements, which is very useful for labor law scholars (p. 41-43). Then, three chapters are dedicated to interviews with professional moderators from the United States and the Philippines and to the working conditions of this category of workers.
