Core Post 5 – Maggie Roberts

 Core Post 5 – Maggie Roberts

A resonant concept which Sarah T. Roberts brings up in her essay, “Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers’ Dirty Work” (2016) is that of “the spectacle” (3). When a social media object is made into a spectacle, it is bestowed the ability to go viral. Often, this quality of “the spectacle” manifests in offensive and inflammatory content over positive posts. As Roberts explains, “[t]he participatory Internet, perhaps once seen as a potential site of escape from the racist tropes or sexism and misogyny (Light, 1995) embedded in American popular culture, has largely failed to deliver on foregrounding mass critical engagement with these issues at all” (4).This engaging quality of hateful rhetoric online draws parallels to Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss Brian Friedberg’s theorizations on memes and the American alt-right movement in Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America (2022). Whether or not this engagement is support or condemnation, the feverish online activity provoked by these inflammatory posts propels the sentiment further, making social media the “perfect mechanism for moving fringe ideas towards the mainstream overtime” (Donovan et al., 2022).

In the case of the CCM workers, their job is to sift through massive quantities of this harmful content, to avoid its spread in the first place. Such labor is not just physical, but also psychological. By making this invisible labor legible, it brings issues of ethics and consumer responsibility to the forefront. What are company and the public’s responsibility to these laborers as people who acts as gatekeepers between “normies” and a CCM manager Roberts interviewed refers to as “a cesspool” (1 & 3).

The earliest of the articles, Tiziana Terranova’s chapter “Free Labor” (2012) brings up these questions about economic and social responsibility via social media. She concludes that “the formation of social and politicalmovements [are beginning to] question not so much the specific domain of social media use but the overall economic structure that supports them” (105). However, what happens when the call is coming from inside the house? What about when the true social and industrial change needs to occur at the level of manufacturing and tech labor itself? This week’s readings, in conjunction with the semester material at large, seem to suggest a tense connection between the objective face of user-friendly technology and the bleak social conditions in which these products are produced, a link so strained, it is about to snap.