Tarleton Gillespie

Microsoft · Microsoft Research

Proponents of generative AI tools claim they will supplement, even replace, the work of cultural production. This raises questions about the politics of visibility: what kinds of stories do these tools tend to generate, and what do they generally not? Do these tools match the kind of diversity of representation that marginalized populations and non...

Recent social science concerning the information technology industries has been driven by a sense of urgency around the problems social media platforms face. But it need not be our job to solve the problems these industries have created, at least not on the terms in which they offer them. When researchers are enlisted in solving the industry’s prob...

Public debate about content moderation has overwhelmingly focused on removal: social media platforms deleting content and suspending users, or opting not to do so. However, removal is not the only available remedy. Reducing the visibility of problematic content is becoming a commonplace element of platform governance. Platforms use machine learning...

Hosted by Northumbria and Birmingham City Universities, the Deplatforming Sex roundtable took place via Teams in October 2021. Participants included Danielle Blunt, Stefanie Duguay, Tarleton Gillespie and Sinnamon Love. Clarissa Smith chaired the discussion, which was transcribed and then edited to cut digressions and repetitions for publication. T...

This article considers how media workers and organizations make use of the abundance of metrics available in the contemporary online environment. The expansion of audience measurement on digital music platforms, dashboard analytics, and third-party providers raises broad societal concerns about the quantification of culture; however, less attention...

Content moderation has exploded as a policy, advocacy, and public concern. But these debates still tend to be driven by high-profile incidents and to focus on the largest, US based platforms. In order to contribute to informed policymaking, scholarship in this area needs to recognise that moderation is an expansive socio-technical phenomenon, which...

In this interdisciplinary roundtable discussion, five scholars interested in political communication work through the democratic dilemmas created when privately owned social media platforms are used as digital public squares by elected officials in the United States. This conversation unfolds in the context of ongoing legal cases that challenge pol...

In this interdisciplinary roundtable discussion, five scholars interested in political communication work through the democratic dilemmas created when privately owned social media platforms are used as digital public squares by elected officials in the United States. This conversation unfolds in the context of ongoing legal cases that challenge pol...

AI seems like the perfect response to the growing challenges of content moderation on social media platforms: the immense scale of the data, the relentlessness of the violations, and the need for human judgments without wanting humans to have to make them. The push toward automated content moderation is often justified as a necessary response to th...

Social media platforms have profoundly transformed cultural production, in part by restructuring the terms by which culture is distributed and paid for. In this article, we examine the YouTube Partner Program and the controversies around the “demonetization” of videos, to understand these arrangements and what happens when they shift beneath creato...

We conclude with a series of questions and answers about how different stakeholders can help combat mediated misogyny and contribute to a safer world: digital platforms, journalism, the law, and universities. Experts in each of these fields present tangible advice, ethics, and guidelines for changing systems of power and challenging misogyny.

Most users want their Twitter feed, Facebook page, and YouTube comments to be free of harassment and porn. Whether faced with “fake news” or livestreamed violence, “content moderators”-who censor or promote user-posted content-have never been more important. This is especially true when the tools that social media platforms use to curb trolling, ba...

Hochfrequenzhandel, Google-Ranking, Filterbubble - nur drei aktuelle Beispiele der Wirkmacht von Algorithmen. Der Band versammelt Beiträge, die sich mit dem historischen Auftauchen und der mittlerweile allgegenwärtigen Verbreitung von Algorithmen in verschiedenen Bereichen des sozialen Lebens beschäftigen. Sie nehmen die Wechselbeziehungen algorith...

Because information algorithms make judgments that can have powerful consequences, those interested in having their information selected will orient themselves toward these algorithmic systems, making themselves algorithmically recognizable, in the hopes that they will be amplified by them. Examining this interplay, between information intermediari...

This essay introduces the special issue of Social Media + Society curated by the editors of Culture Digitally and drawn from the community of Culture Digitally contributors.

Social media platforms don’t just guide, distort, and facilitate social activity, they also delete some of it. They don’t just link users together, they also suspend them. They don’t just circulate our images and posts, they also algorithmically promote some over others. Platforms pick and choose.

The flag is now a common mechanism for reporting offensive content to an online platform, and is used widely across most popular social media sites. It serves both as a solution to the problem of curating massive collections of user-generated content and as a rhetorical justification for platform owners when they decide to remove content. Flags are...

In CSCW and information science research today, the worlds of design, practice, and policy are often held separate, speaking to different audiences, venues, and fields of expertise. But many growing areas of CSCW work, including mobile, cloud, and social computing, run into problems precisely at this intersection. This paper presents a model for un...

Algorithms (particularly those embedded in search engines, social media platforms, recommendation systems, and information databases) play an increasingly important role in selecting what information is considered most relevant to us, a crucial feature of our participation in public life. As we have embraced computational tools as our primary media...

Culture Digitally is a collective of scholars, gathered by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through numerous projects, collaborations, a scholarly blog, and annual w...

In this paper, we examine the inverse and converging movement of two sets of institutions: news organizations, as they find that part of their mission necessarily includes hosting an unruly user community that does not always play by the norms of journalism; and online media platforms and social networks designed for users to share content, as they...

Addressing the reasons for—and the solutions to—the “digital divide” has been on the public agenda since the emergence of the Internet. However, the term has meant quite different things, depending on the audience and the context, and these competing interpretations may in fact orient toward different policy outcomes. The goals of this article are...

Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has b...

To curb unauthorized downloading, the major media corporations have developed education campaigns aimed at children. This essay interrogates these campaigns in terms of their characterization of copyright law and online infringement. Their lessons tend to recast a balance of societal interests as a simple obligation of respect. File trading is pain...

Digital rights management technology, or DRM, provides self-enforcing technical exclusion from pre-determined uses of informational works. Such technical exclusion may supplement or even supplant intellectual property laws. The deployment of DRM has been subsidized by laws prohibiting both disabling of technical controls and assisting others to dis...

The term 'end-to-end' has become a familiar characterization of the architecture of the Internet, not only in engineering discourse, but in contexts as varied as political manifestos, commercial promotions, and legal arguments. Its ubiquity and opacity cloaks the complexity of the technology it describes, and stands in for a richer controversy abou...

Recently, the major US music and movie companies have pursued a dramatic renovation in their approach to copyright enforcement. This shift, from the code' of law to the code' of software, looks to technologies themselves to regulate or make unavailable those uses of content traditionally handled through law. Critics worry about the compliance' rule...

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been criticized for granting too much power to copyright holders, offering them new technological controls that may harm the public interest. But, by considering this exclusively as a copyright issue, we overlook how the DMCA anticipates a technological and commercial infrastructure for regulating not only c...

Digital rights management technology, or DRM, provides self-enforcing technical exclusion from pre-determined uses of informational works. Such technical exclusion may supplement or even supplant intellectual property laws. The deployment of DRM has been subsidized by laws prohibiting both disabling of technical controls and assisting others to dis...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2002. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 528-550).