\u201cThe style of moderation can vary from site to site, and from platform to platform, as rules around what UGC is allowed are often set at a site or platform level, and reflect that platform\u2019s brand and reputation, its tolerance for risk, and the type of user engagement it wishes to attract.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah T. Roberts, \u201cContent Moderation,\u201d in Encyclopedia of Big Data<\/em>, eds. Laurie A. Schintler and Connie L. McNeely (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2017), 1.<\/p>\n In reflecting on our readings and our discussion this week, this quote by Sarah T. Roberts stood out to me, and it brought to mind several related thoughts about user-generated content and user interactions by academics and others on online platforms.<\/p>\n Through my personal Facebook account, I am a member of several private groups related to my professional interests, including Friends of the International Congress on Medieval Studies (2,218 members), the International Society for the Study of Medievalism (541 members), and Teaching the Middle Ages (2,765 members). With the exception of the second group, these groups are not officially affiliated with professional organizations, though they do consist of academics and others with interests in these topics. Each group has at least one admin or moderator who is at least nominally responsible for moderating user-generated content and managing the community of members.<\/p>\n As Roberts has noted, the \u201cstyle of moderation\u201d of sites and platforms, and of groups hosted by platforms, can and does vary, and I am interested here in considering private Facebook groups such as those I mentioned that I am a member of as spaces in which users generate more or less \u201cacademic\u201d or \u201cprofessional\u201d content through their personal social media accounts. These private groups can be, and have been, contentious spaces, with posts, conversations, and, at times, arguments about prejudice and discrimination faced by members of these groups, particularly medievalists of color, having resulted in reminders by the groups\u2019 admins of acceptable behavior within the group and in tensions among members both in these online spaces and in the field more generally.<\/p>\n Considered more broadly, what implications and impacts might the moderation of user-generated content and user interactions on online platforms, particularly social media, have for academic communities?<\/p>\n With pressure to be professionally \u201cvisible\u201d and \u201cengaged\u201d in online spaces, including social media platforms, as part of professional networking, gaining field recognition, and improving one\u2019s metrics for the hiring and tenure processes\u2014I am thinking here of our conversations and work earlier this semester with Michael Dietrich\u2014are there ethical concerns in asking or expecting academics to build an online professional presence, particularly in regard to graduate students, early career scholars, and those who are unaffiliated, given that such a presence requires continuous work and that this work is likely to be uncompensated and unacknowledged?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cThe style of moderation can vary from site to site, and from platform to platform, as rules around what UGC is allowed are often set at a site or platform level, and reflect that platform\u2019s brand and reputation, its tolerance for risk, and the type of user engagement it wishes to attract.\u201d Sarah T. Roberts, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-5"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.haa.pitt.edu\/digitalcriticalmethods\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}