Content moderation: Social media’s sexist assemblages

This paper proposes ‘sexist assemblages’ as a way of understanding how the human and mechanical elements that make up social media content moderation assemble to perpetuate normative gender roles, particularly white femininities, and to police content related to women and their bodies. It investigates sexist assemblages through three of many potential elements: (1) the normatively gendered content presented to users through inplatform keyword and hashtag searches; (2) social media platforms’ community guidelines, which lay out platforms’ codes of conduct and reveal biases and subjectivities, and (3) the over-simplification of gender identities that is necessary to algorithmically recommend content to users as they move through platforms. By the time the reader finds this paper, the elements of the assemblages we identify might have shifted (Latour, 1990), but we hope the framework remains useful for those aiming to understand the relationship between content moderation and longstanding forms of inequality.