First Monday this month is a special issue on feminist perspectives on digital labour. The collection includes this article, which looks at how social networks choose to accept or reject content for display. It's an opaque and ultimately conservative process. In a commercial service looking at a piece of content, "its value to the platform as a potentially revenue-generating commodity is actually the key criterion and the one to which all moderation decisions are ultimately reduced. The result is commercialized online spaces that have far less to offer in terms of political and democratic challenge to the status quo and which, in fact, may serve to reify and consolidate power rather than confront it." Which seems right to me.
I want to juxtapose this article with a recent post in Wired on How Trump Conquered Facebook Without Russian Ads. While it looks like good investigative journalism, it's an advertorial. It was actually written by Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook employee "charged with turning Facebook data into money." How was this author and this subject selected by Wired? Software like NationBuilder, Custom Audiences, LookAlike Audiences and such are used by political campaigns to gather data and influence users. It costs a lot. And the people who buy products are the people who select the content we see on Faebook and in the pages of Wired. This too makes it hard to challenge the status quo and serves to reify and consolidate power. These are things educators using social networks should consider.
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