25 July 2024. Beehive Seminar: Platformed Hate Speech Against Women: Self-Regulation and the Corporate Power of Social Media Platforms. Anjalee de Silva & Christine Parker.

25 July 2024. 2 - 3 pm
Room 1002 (access via Level 9 stairs)
Melbourne Law School

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Register here.

Beehive Seminar - ‘Platformed Hate Speech Against Women: Self-Regulation and the Corporate Power of Social Media Platforms’

Anjalee de Silva & Christine Parker.

We critically examine responses to platformed ‘hate speech’ against women, what we describe as ‘sex-based vilification’, that occurs on major digital and online social media platforms. We do this by combining an analysis of platform power, particularly platforms’ discursive power, with critical feminist understandings of sex-based vilification as constituting and causing the systemic subordination and silencing of women. We argue that sex-based vilification occurring on digital social media platforms may be said to be platformed in three main ways: first, it is speech the prevalence and severity of which is amplified on platforms; second, it is speech the functions or harms of which are accommodated and therein authorised on platforms; and third, it is speech that is auspiced by these platforms. This auspicing role of platforms is our focus in this article. Sex-based vilification is auspiced by platforms in the sense that it is buttressed by the algorithmic recommender systems at the core of their business, as well as their provision of pervasive media infrastructures for social and affective self-presentation and connection. Importantly, it is also buttressed by platforms’ discursive claims to effective self-governance and freedom from external interference. We argue that while platforms certainly do have a responsibility to themselves identify and remove harmful content, including content constituting sex-based vilification, there is a problematic privileging of or bias towards self-regulatory action in current laws and law reform proposals for platform governance internationally. We argue that this bias is an outworking of the discursive power of platforms to set the terms of the debate and what can be thought of as possible regulatory governance solutions. Accordingly, we argue that this bias can only work to strengthen the intersection of patriarchy and platform power in platforming sex-based vilification. Platforms may thus be seen as exercising their discursive power to manifest an additional ‘layer’ of contempt for women, for which they (the platforms) may be critiqued and held accountable. As an alternative, we suggest that sex-based vilification occurring on platforms is best addressed through a multifaceted ‘eco-system’ of legal and regulatory accountability mechanisms.

Register here.