I’m on 7% charge and only managed to blog the first paper in the final session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow today, which was presented by Sanna Malinen. Her focus is on platforms and censorship, and she notes that activists have increasingly needed to consider visibility-based platform algorithms in their work.
Such algorithms are increasingly shaping visibility rather than banning problematic content altogether; this enables platforms to continue to engage in data gathering and surveillance even when users and their content are made less visible. Such interventions reduce the ability of activists to use such platforms to make their voices heard; private-owned platforms have the right to shape their algorithms as they see fit, of course, but in doing so also make themselves instruments of political repression.
Historically, moderation has been disproportionately directed towards marginalised groups; those who are marginalised offline thus remain marginalised in social media environments too. Sanna explored this further through a study of digital activists in Finland, exploring their experiences of social media censorship through 15 in-depth interviews.
Instagram was the most popular platform for them, but also the one where they most experienced censorship; censorship was experienced especially in the context of activism on Palestine, transgender rights, and gender diversity, and manifested mostly in sudden declines in visibility and follower engagement as well as strange technical disruptions (e.g. scrambling images and videos or disabling content posting, sharing, and live-streaming functionalities). Such apparent bugs were an annoyance and frustration that discouraged activists from further content creation.
Activists responded to this by avoiding keywords that might trigger such censorship, using images of text rather than textual content itself, and obfuscating the spelling of terms like ‘Gaza’ in order to slip through the net; whether this really enabled them to circumvent censorship mechanisms was less clear, however.
They also regularly took breaks from social media or posted neutral content (pets, nature) in order to reset (or ‘clean’) the algorithm and enhance the visibility of their next activist posts. Another approach was to coordinate mutual likes and comments in order to boost each other’s content.
These users had folk theories about such censorship, including suppositions about Meta’s interest in appearing non-political, commercial agendas, or alignment with current US government politics.
