Conference by Sarah T. Roberts (Assistant Professor - University of California, Los Angeles - Department of Information Studies)

Commercial content moderation (CCM) is the large-scale screening by humans of content uploaded to social media sites—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and others. Increasingly, social media platforms rely on massive quantities of UGC data to populate them and to drive user engagement; with that increase has come the need for platforms and sites to enforce their rules and relevant or applicable laws, as the posting of inappropriate content is considered a major source of liability.

Following six years of study of the practices of CCM and the workers who undertake it, Roberts connects the threads of this globalized, low-status and little known practice to other phenomena in the digital economy, such as precarity, deregulation, and other types of “disruption” often to the detriment of workers. CCM as undertaken in Silicon Valley, USA, and Manila, Philippines (the top site of call center work in the world) will be described and discussed, and the political and social implications and costs will be described.

Only a limited number of places available.To register, please follow the link.

Co-organized by ENDL and i3