Sarah T. Roberts’ article “Commerical Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work” identifies how CCM employees, mass media, and corporations control and maintain systems of oppression affecting women and other marginalized communities. For example Roberts explains, “It can appear that content just naturally exists, and should exist, in the digital ecosystem, rather than it often being the result of a decision-making process that has weighed the merits of making it available against the result of removing it, or a system that simply has not been able to deal with it yet” (149). Mainly, when digital content or UCC challenges these social normatives, marginalized communities may remain silenced. Ultimately most social normative or “standards” of beauty, “coolness,” sexuality, age, and (dis)abilities create unearned privileges for women and folks within a white, cis-gendered, able-bodied, higher social class, and higher educated people. Silencing and erasure of their truth and experiences are controlled, approved, or denied through CMM workers at the guidance of mass media and corporations. Futhermore, the censorship of content in the digital world has the power to either challenge or advance institutional violence, as well. Accordingly, when specific content is deemed (in)civil, or too challenging to unspoken rules, regulations, and sociocultural normative which all uphold institutionalized racism and oppression for marginalized communities, US mass media and pop-cultural become signifiers and part of the systemic oppression. What content brings more money to a platform, corporation or company, or has the chance to become viral, regardless of the harm and violence it may cause or sustain will go uncensored, or be appropriated based on cultural differences in efforts to capitalize on financial profits. Like all scenes, words, actions, and beyond are orchestrated in film making and other media types of popular culture, we must critique the digital world through these same lenses. We must work to dismantle the hate, harm, erasure, stereotypes, and violence that leak into these platforms and support the axes of oppression within folks’ social locations and identities.
Works Cited
Roberts, Sarah T. “Commerical Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work.” The Intersectional Internet: Race. Sex, Class, and Culture Online, edited by Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes, vol. 105, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc, 2016, pp. 148–59.
