I chose to focus on Tarleton Gillespie’s “Custodians of the Internet” video discussion

uploaded by Harvard because it revealed to me the reality of moderating on platforms. Before

watching the video, I never necessarily thought about moderation. The most exposure I have had

about moderation was with my brother and his PlayStation, for his friends will say inappropriate

or hurtful statements in game chats or chat rooms and get banned minutes later. I honestly

believed before studying this discussion that it was only the company’s employees who were in

charge of moderation, and I assumed that the same people who handle my complaints on

changing my password or account name are the ones that handle moderation. After watching the

video, it makes a lot of sense to me that many platforms will hire teams of individuals trained to

deal with moderation concerns and that expertise only, but it really interested me the different

alternatives many big platforms use to moderate aside from hiring internal teams. Third-party

reviewers were not a huge shock, for many companies will hire on or branch out to third-party

companies to help out in some sector, but community managers were something I never thought

of before. I have multiple social media accounts, and there’s a few where I have joined groups

where I had to be accepted by an admin in order to join. Mainly Facebook groups, I have to

agree to the rules and policies before being accepted. I have seen hundreds of posts or comments

get taken down for violating guidelines, accounts get removed from the group, or personal posts

get denied from being posted by the admins. It is cool that Facebook has that tool to take some of

the heat off their employees and allow users to have a sense of control in something they’re truly

interested in. Gillespie highlights Reddit for utilizing this approach mostly, and while I haven’t

used my Reddit account as much, I do see edits on comments or little notes that an admin

removed a post or archived the thread. One last thing I really liked from the video was Gillespie

claiming that platform survival is dependent on moderation, and a platform without moderation
is not a platform in principle. Moderation isn’t something I think of often, so it’s never occurred

to me how platforms will manage without flags or report features. Twitter is a great example of

this, for you can find dozens of threads with inappropriate content posted and not being taken

down for days and there’s times where that content will be shared on innocent, normal threads. In

my opinion, it’s been worse since Elon Musk bought Twitter. Overall, I felt really enlightened

after watching this video and have been more mindful while on social media. I pay attention to

the deleted content I once saw or the features offered for reporting.