Time and Date: March 18, 3-4pm CEST
Platform Gaslighting
Tom Divon, Dr. Carolina Are
In this talk, Tom Divon and Carolina Are will present findings showing how platforms routinely deploy gaslighting as a corporate communications strategy against content creators. With a user-centric approach to examining Instagram and TikTok’s content moderation communications, they highlight the lived experiences of Palestinian and Jewish activists, and sex-positive educators, whose efforts are undermined and distorted by the platforms’ opaque, contradictory, and dismissive responses. Their findings reveal how platforms strategically weaponize tech knowledge and automated and human governance mechanisms to evade accountability and consolidate platforms’ power.
By amplifying the voices of affected communities, Tom and Carolina will highlight the challenges involved in studying content creators. In the opaque landscape of platform governance, where key processes are concealed, researchers are often left with no choice but to rely heavily on creators’ experiences as their primary source of data. This reliance underscores the complexity of disentangling platforms’ means, shifting intentions, and strategically ambiguous strategies, blended with creators’ own experiences. Aside from impeding scrutiny, platforms’ lack of transparency places an additional burden on creators to articulate and expose these hidden dynamics, leading to broader questions of trust and accountability.
Presenting Authors
Tom Divon is an ethnographer of user-platform interactions, focusing on creator culture, platform affordances, and user-generated content. In his PhD taking place in the Department of Communication at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Divon explores the socio-political subcultures of platforms across three distinct domains on TikTok: Memory: creators’ engagement with historical commemoration and education; Activism: creators’ actions against racism, antisemitism, and hate speech, and (3) Conflict: creators’ memetic participation in identity-driven warfare, with a focus on Palestinian resistance.
Dr. Carolina Are is a platform governance researcher with a PhD in online abuse and conspiracy theories, currently working as Innovation Fellow at Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Citizens. Following her experiences of online censorship, she has been researching on algorithmic bias against nudity and sexuality on social media, and has published the first study on the shadowbanning of pole dancing in Feminist Media Studies. Her work has been published in New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Media, Culture & Society, Convergence and Porn Studies, and it has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Conversation, the BBC, Wired, the MIT Technology Review. She is also a content creator and blogger, as well as an activist, pole dance performer and instructor, on social media at @bloggeronpole.
About the Series
This talk is part of the series Behind the Scenes – Conversations on Empirical Platform Governance Research that invites scholars in this field to share their experiences and views, fostering community exchange about how we can study platform governance in this challenging context. It is hosted by the Lab “Platform Governance, Media, and Technology” (PGMT) at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI), University of Bremen, and the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen.
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