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/ -- 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. -- 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.