Fall 2020
Week 9: 2002–2016
Social Media: Friends, Feeds, and the Hidden Work of Content Moderation
Materials
Content Moderation
• Sarah T. Roberts, “Social Media’s Silent Filter,” The Atlantic, March 8, 2017.
• Isaac Chotiner, “The Underworld of Online Content Moderation,” The New Yorker, July 5, 2019.
• André Brock, “‘The Black Purposes of Space Travel’: Black Twitter as Black Technoculture,” in Distributed Blackness, Open Access at NYU Press.
Social Media Influencers
• Kevin Roose, “Don’t Scoff at Influencers. They’re Taking Over the World,” New York Times, July 16, 2019.
• Tom Peters, “The Brand Called You,” Fast Company, August 31, 1997.
Perspectives
• Mark O’Connell, “The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media,” The New Yorker, September 19, 2018.
• Patricia Lockwood, “The Communal Mind,” London Review of Books 41, no. 4 (February 2019).
Recommended
Further Reading
• Jaron Lanier. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now. Henry Holt and Co., 2018.
• André Brock Jr. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. NYU Press, 2020. (Open Access)
• Sarah T. Roberts. Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media. Yale University Press, 2019.
• Limor Shifman. Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press, 2014.
Podcasts
• “Jaron Lanier Wants You to Delete Social Media,” American Innovation, April 11, 2019.
• “Memes, Memes Everywhere,” History of the Internet, July 12, 2017.