Abstract: Social media platforms generate huge profits from free user data. Twitter and other social media sites benefit additionally from the labour of volunteer community managers whose efforts to moderate misogyny and sexism online are often unwanted, punished, and viewed as censorship, uncivil behaviour, or themselves forms of sexism. Hashtag movements like #ThisTweetCalledMyBack reveal a growing labour consciousness on the part of these volunteers and an awareness of their role as an emergent formation within this ‘new economy’ (Nakamura)
Important Quotes/Claims
“I am specifically interested in the hidden and often-stigmatised and dangerous labour performed by women of colour, queer and trans people, and racial minorities who call out, educate, protest, and design around toxic social environments in digital media. Social media platforms benefit from the crowd-sourced labour of internet users who, with varying degrees of gentleness or force, intervene in racist and sexist discourse online. This labour is uncompensated by wages, paid instead by affective currencies such as ‘likes’, followers, and occasionally, acknowledgement or praise from the industry.”
Cheap female labour is the engine that powers the internet. Some of this labour occurs in the fabrication laboratories and electronic assembly plants in East Asia where almost all of the world’s chips and digital devices are produced. Women of colour are the majority of this workforce, as has been the case since the industry’s early days.
Over a thousand indigenous Navajo worked at a state of the art plant on the reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico producing chips from 1965-1975, receiving less than U.S. minimum wage.
Alley were expected to add their cheap or free labour to their paid labour by talking up their companies at key social events and trade shows, thereby blurring the line between paid work and play. She terms this ‘venture labour’ – workers willingly took up this burden because firstly, it didn’t seem like a burden; self-interest was at the core of the motivation for contributing this kind of digital labour. As she writes, ‘there is clearly a great degree of work involved in building and maintaining these regional economies, and this work is disproportionately done after hours by people who have the time, ability, and social capital to navigate such events (p160).’
They may all be labouring in the digital economy, but just as they are gendered and racialised differently, they are rewarded differently and under different conditions. David Hesmondhalgh says as much when he asks, ‘are we really meant to see creating code or writing about favourite shows online as ‘exploited’ in the same way as those who endure appalling conditions and pay in Indonesian sweatshops?’5 Many of the ‘venture labourers’ that Neff writes about were white, male, and from middle class backgrounds, giving them a leg-up in the fend-for yourself-economy of software development work, while the mostly-female Asian assembly workers at Foxconn labour with no jackpot in sight.
These are unpaid and collectively produced passion projects, all of which have received some positive recognition as well as much negative blowback. Though this kind of activity may not fit into traditional definitions of what labour is, some of its practitioners define it this way. A Twitter hashtag called #This Tweet Called My Back, authored by a collective of woman of colour social media activists, makes reference to the iconic woman of colour anthology This Bridge Called My Back because it makes a similar claim: that the labour of educating white men and women about racism and sexism is difficult, valuable, and unappreciated. The fact that this labour occurs via Twitter and Tumblr doesn’t detract from its value or difficulty, according to these authors, who write:We are your unwaged labour in our little corner of the internet that feeds a movement. Hours of teach-ins, hashtags, Twitter chats, video chats and phone calls to create a sustainable narrative and conversation around decolonization and antiblackness. As an online collective of Black, Afro-Indigenous, and NDN women, we have created an entire framework with which to understand gender violence and racial hierarchy in a global and U.S. context.6
Though the act of communicating with the public about racism, sexism, homophobia, and other social justice issues is unpaid, and often results in the poster being harassed, trolled, and threatened on these fora, these authors claim this content adds traffic and value to these platforms by attracting readers and followers. The human labour required to make platforms fun, easy, and safe to use – the provision of free advice, the documentation and dissemination of behaviour and speech that creates unsafe conditions for specific groups, and the openness towards forming new relationships with strangers who want or need them – has been treated in much the same way as reproductive labour, and therefore feminised, devalued, ultimately offshored for pay, and borne by volunteers.
The continuum of users performing this labour ranges from social justice content producers who self-identify as such and may even support themselves in this way, to anonymous users on websites like 4chan or Reddit who intervene in misogynist or racist speech or behaviour they see on these sites.
Users who tweet and post responses to misogyny and racism online are in effect venture community managers, and many of them define themselves as workers. Their interventions are intended to create better conditions for women and minority in social media and gaming, and though their reception has not always been warm, their labour mirrors some of the internet’s earliest volunteer community managers and content moderators.
Tiziana Terranova’s classic and generative critique of ‘free labour’ starts out with an iconic story about a platform’s exploitation of free and volunteer digital labour.
Questions:
How many of you use social media? Of you that raised your hands, how many of you pay for subscriptions to any of these medias? For example Youtube premium, Spotify premium or Instagram analytics?
With that being said, should people get paid for the amount of engagement and activity they put into social media?
At what cost should people start charging for their ideas and not allowing people to take advantage of their “free thoughts”?
What are some possibilities to compensate the labor of these people on social media? Should people who freely volunteer their time get to moderate get paid?
Thoughts on the internet forming its own economic entity?
Is this a global or domestic problem?
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