Platform Governmentality: Content Moderation in Anonymous Social Media

Social media platforms and online communities have become a locus of various forms of e-bile, vitriol, trolling, flaming, and harassment. Though such behaviour can be said to exist across a wide array of different platforms (including Facebook and Twitter) it is especially intensified in platforms that are organized around anonymity or pseudonymity. This paper will explore the concept of platform governmentality to understand how social media companies regulate and shape flows of content so to dampen the intensity of toxic behaviour. The anonymous social media platform Yik Yak serves as a good case study of the successes and failures of digital modes of governmentality in anonymous cyberspaces. To mediate issues of toxic behaviour, Yik Yak enlisted the support of nonhuman algorithms and human users, as well as strategies of hierarchal and lateral forms of surveillance, to shape how users were able to interact over the platform’s interface. Drawing from the results of a digital ethnography on Yik Yak and twelve semi-structured interviews with invested Yik Yak users, I will empirically trace the various semiotic and material practices deployed under Yik Yak’s mode of governmentality. This project will combine material semiotics with Foucauldian insights in order to explore how discipline and social control is practiced in (un)disciplined, anonymous communities.