[Air-L] LIVE STREAM Tomorrow, 12pm EDT: "Custodians of the Internet" with Tarleton Gillespie

[Christian Sandvig]

Hello AoIR:

Last week's live stream broke our internal record for largest online
audience -- thank you for tuning in!  We will continue the "soft opening"
phase of our new research center with another event tomorrow.  Our center,
called ESC: The Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing, will be
live-streaming Tarleton Gillespie's talk on content moderation. I expect he
will talk about his new book, recently reviewed in _Science_ as "both a
comprehensive retrospective and critical provocation" about the role of
online platforms in policing the "problems of harassment, obscenity, and
hate." The LA Review of books called it an "excellent and timely" review of
the "system of private law [that] happens in secret" and governs what can
be said online.

I wanted to flag this for your attention in case you are interested in
watching. Of course you are also invited to forward this announcement as
appropriate.

Yours sincerely,
Christian

--
http://umich.edu/~csandvig/


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TITLE
Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden
Decisions That Shape Social Media

SPEAKER
Tarleton Gillespie (http://www.tarletongillespie.org/)

DATE, TIME, AND LOCATION
Thursday, April 25, 2019; 12pm-1pm Eastern Daylight Time (UTC/GMT-4)
Light lunch will be served
Ehrlicher Room, 3100 North Quad, 105 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
Directions to this room: http://bit.ly/Ehrlicher (follow path #2)
Free and open to the public, no RSVP is required.

FOR REMOTE PARTICIPANTS
VIDEO FROM THIS TALK WILL BE STREAMED LIVE
For video, during the event visit this URL: http://umsi.info/gillespie


ABSTRACT
Content moderation can serve as a prism for examining what platforms are,
and how they subtly torque public life. Our understanding of platforms too
blithely accepted the terms in which they were sold and celebrated – open,
impartial, connective, progressive, transformative – skewing our study of
social behavior that happens on them, stunting our examination of their
societal impact.

Content moderation doesn’t fit this celebratory vision. As such, it has
often been treated as peripheral to what they do—a custodial task, like
sweeping up, occasional and invisible. What if moderation is in fact
central to what platforms do? Moderation is an enormous part of the work of
running a platform, in terms of people, time, and cost. The work of
policing all this caustic content and abuse haunts platforms, and
profoundly shapes how they work.

Today, social media platforms are being scrutinized in the press; specific
controversies, each a tiny crisis of trust, have gelled into a more
profound interrogation of their responsibilities to users and society. What
are the implications of the emerging demand that platforms serve not as
conduits or arbiters, but as custodians? This is uncharted territory for
the platforms, a very different notion of how they should earn the trust of
their users and stand accountable to civil society.


SPEAKER BIO
Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New
England, and an affiliated associate professor in the Department of
Communication and Department of Information Science at Cornell University.
His new book, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation,
and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media (Yale University Press)
was published in June 2018. He is also the author of Wired Shut: Copyright
and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2007), the co-editor of Media
Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (MIT,
2014), and the co-founder of the blog Culture Digitally.


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This talk and the speaker series listed below are part of the "soft
opening" of ESC: The Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing.
http://esc.umich.edu/

This event is generously supported by the School of Information; the Center
for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research; and the
Department of Communication Studies in the College of Literature, Science,
and the Arts at the University of Michigan.

Event details on the Web:
http://esc.umich.edu/event/ethics-politics-of-ai-tartleton-gillespie/
A PDF flyer for this series:
http://esc.umich.edu/ESC_Events_Flyer_Fall_2019.pdf

________________________________

All events in this series:


CRITICAL x DESIGN: A new event series about ethics, society, and computing

Mar 20 (Wed) 3-4pm, 3100 North Quad, snacks provided

Katherine Behar: Digitally Divided: The Art of Algorithmic (In)Decision

Mar 27 (Wed) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided

Ben Grosser: Less Metrics, More Rando: (Net) Art as Software Research

Apr 11 (Thu) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided

Joy Rankin: Old, Raw, or New: A (New?) Deal for the Digital Age


Apr 19 (Fri) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided

Lucy Suchman: Apparatuses of Recognition: Google, Project Maven, and
Targeted Killing (*) (†)

________________________________

*The Ethics and Politics of AI: A Week of Events*

Apr 19 (Fri) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided
Lucy Suchman: *Apparatuses of Recognition: Google, Project Maven, and
Targeted Killing* (*) (†)

Apr 22 (Mon) 3-4pm, 3100 North Quad, snacks provided
Anna Lauren Hoffmann: *Data Violence: Discourse and Justice in a Datafied
World*

Apr 25 (Thu) 12-1pm, 3100 North Quad, light lunch provided
Tarleton Gillespie: *Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content
Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media* (*)

________________________________


(*) -- This event will be live streamed.

(†) -- This event is in *both* the "CRITICAL x DESIGN" and "The Ethics and
Politics of AI" event series.


All talks will be recorded, pending speaker approval.

*All talks will be held in the Ehrlicher Room, 3100 North Quad*, 105 S.
State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
Directions to this room: http://bit.ly/Ehrlicher (follow path #2)
Free and open to the public, no RSVP is required.