Stefanie Duguay – The Role of Platforms in Toxic Technocultures: Queer Women’s Experiences of Social Media Governance, Architectures, and Cultures

From the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the inconsistent moderation of misogynist subreddits, it is clear that social media companies’ decisions with regard to governing users and their content are often retroactive, partial, and opaque. In this presentation, I will discuss my recent article, co-authored with Professor Jean Burgess and Associate Professor Nicolas Suzor, which explores the impact of social media governance through an analysis of three platforms—Tinder, Instagram, and Vine—and through interviews with queer women who use these platforms. Findings reveal a common approach that we have termed “patchwork platform governance,” which relies on formal policies and content moderation mechanisms but pays little attention to dominant platform technocultures (cultures emerging from user practices and technological arrangements). Patchwork platform governance is most apparent in different ways on these platforms: On Tinder, it enables deceptive and sexually aggressive users to perpetuate norms against reporting such behaviour. With Instagram, targeted reporting of queer women’s content leads to its removal and the censorship of lesbian-related hashtags. In contrast, Vine’s relaxed content moderation policies contributed to queer women receiving a barrage of harassment. Across all three, patchwork platform governance constrained queer women’s digital participation, as participants often spoke about self-censoring and disengaging in response. We argue that this demonstrates a need for platforms to more comprehensively consider how technological architectures can sustain dominant technocultures, often at the expense of marginalized individuals.