Corporeal moderation: digital labour as affective good

Abstract

Digital labour scholars have produced insightful analyses of the unpaid, creative, affective labour performed by users on social media platforms. Meanwhile, an increasing number of scholars have been studying the hidden labour of content moderators: underpaid, contingent workers who enable the sanitised online spaces that users take for granted by removing disturbing content. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with third-party Facebook content moderators in the USA and Ireland, I argue that the case of content moderation affords us a new way of putting these approaches into conversation with one another. Specifically, I illustrate how content moderators perform affective labour – for themselves and for the platform – in ways that make possible the monetisation of users’ cultural activities. In doing so, I draw attention to the human costs of maintaining user ‘safety’ and thus the profitability of large social media platforms.