Seemingly hypocritical moderation decisions stem from slippage between labor layers.

Evidence

The challenge of content moderation, then, is as much about the coordination of work as it is about making judgments. First, decisions the press or disgruntled users see as mistaken or hypocritical might be the result of slippage between these divisions of labor—between what is allowed and what is flagged, between how a policy is set and how it is conveyed to a fluctuating population of crowdworkers, between how a violation is understood in different cultural climates, between what does get objected to and what should. A platform might instantiate a reasonable rule with good intentions and thoughtful criteria, but that rule may be interpreted very differently by the internal policy team, the temporary reviewers in another part of the world, the community moderator on the ground, and the offended user clicking the flag. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 407

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes the ch1 & ch3 claims that moderation errors are ‘deliberate trained decisions’ or ‘retroactive tombstones’ — here Gillespie claims many decisions are neither deliberate nor policy-driven but coordination failures. — connects to: Facebook’s removal of Napalm Girl was a deliberate trained decision, not an error. — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 18
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the chapter’s central analytical payoff: the theory that distributed labor rather than bad policy explains many celebrated moderation failures. Offers a genuinely alternate causal model for scandals discussed earlier in the book.