There’s not enough disobedience online. Yes, that’s right, you heard me: there’s not enough space for disobedience online.
This may seem like a ludicrous claim, especially when leveled at the major social media platforms, which are currently struggling to deal with overwhelming tides of misinformation, harassment, conspiracy, demagoguery, and more. But these content moderation issues are symptoms of a greater problem with how the platforms are governed: in an extremely hierarchical, top-down manner.
Platform authoritarianism is fractal. Content moderators are low wage workers whose critiques of moderation guidelines are valued even less than the moderators’ (largely ignored) mental and physical health. Product teams treat users as subjects to be surveilled rather than partners in design. The companies who own the platforms craft their goals around the needs of distant shareholders rather than immediate stakeholders such as workers and users. Even at the societal level, we’ve chosen to reify these power structures by protecting platforms from responsibility for bad decisions (see Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) and by criminalizing efforts of users to work around these poorly designed systems (see the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). From lines of code to lines of law, there’s very little room for disobedience.
It’s easy to see that as a good thing when we’re visualizing a Twitter troll, flaunting the site’s content policy in order to spit invective at an activist. But there are many different kinds of disobedience. One kind, civil disobedience, has helped rectify some of the greatest injustices in our history.