Speaker: Michael Randall Barnes

A great amount of communication now occurs on social media platforms. And sometimes these communicative acts cause and/or constitute harmful acts. The harms of social media raise a number of questions concerning the processes and aims of content moderation—the practice of monitoring and managing user-generated content. In this paper, Dr Barnes uses tools from speech act theory to clarify the contribution that platform companies make when harms occur. He does so by examining three key features of online environments: algorithms, amplifications, and affordances. While overlapping descriptions of broader platform environments, he uses each category to isolate a key feature of online speech that bears on questions of responsibility. Through algorithms that shape the context of interaction, platforms do more than simply connect speakers and audiences, but serve as constitutive intermediaries that shape users’ speech. Through practices of amplifications, platforms both empower regular users to produce more harmful utterances and, more interestingly, sometimes become wrongful actors themselves by recommending harmful content to an audience. Finally, through various affordances, platforms perform second-personal speech acts that call for user responses, and in doing so invite and refuse certain forms of behavior. Overall, he argues that a clearer conception of platforms shape their users’ speech, and how and when they perform speech acts themselves, improves our understanding of their culpability.

Please note that these seminars are open to the public and in person only.