Ignored and Deleted: Understanding content moderators as racialized media of social network services

This thesis investigates how Facebook moderates its social media platform and mediates content flow by employing subcontracted Filipino workers as a form of racialized media filter. Scholarships on social media networks have often focused on the contents that flow through its networks, rather than the material and historical make-up of the infrastructure that enables said circulation. The thesis seeks to highlight the colonial and racist logic that undergird commercialized content moderation and its practice of global labour outsourcing that seeks to meet the Western social media and tech companies’ demand for cheap, fast, and available labour. The research looks to the history of transcontinental railway and its usage of Chinese migrant labour as a parallel media history and to Armond R. Towns’ “Black mediality” as a conceptual framework that helps illustrate the colonial mode of racialization inherent in contemporary network of social media.