The Anonymous Culture Cops of the Internet
Giant tech companies and governments largely determine what content is and isn’t allowed online, and their decisions impact billions of people: 55 percent of internet users worldwide open either social media or search engines to read or watch news.1 YouTube and its parent company, Google, consistently attract controversy for the decisions they make about which sorts of content will be allowed (and allowed to generate revenue) on the world’s most popular video site, while China’s great firewall prevents residents of the most populous country in the world from viewing material deemed threatening by the Chinese Communist Party. Because these are such powerful institutions, their decisions, and decision-making processes, have generated an understandable amount of attention—it’s no mystery why the major platforms’ fights against COVID-19 misinformation have sparked such clamorous discussion.2
What sometimes gets obscured is the fact that many Stories like this, about top-down censorship, can overshadow the fact that volunteer moderators on subreddits have near-unlimited power to set and enforce community discourse boundaries. Likewise, on Twitter, the microblogging platform where many journalists waste a lot of their time, what (and who) gets banned by the platform is largely determined by what users decide to “report” as offensive or misleading. This massive, mostly anonymous and pseudonymous group of internet culture cops is doing a large and likely growing share of the daily work of content-policing.
