Intersectional Philosophy of Technology Speaker Series
Session 1: “How the Internet Became Straight” with Alexander Monea
16 maart 2023 15:30 t/m 17:00 - Locatie: TPM college room J and online | Zet in mijn agenda
The internet has become an increasingly hostile space for queer expression. This talk examines the ways in which heteronormativity is increasingly embedded in internet architectures, paying specific attention to how systemic anti-LGBTQIA+ biases have become embedded into the content moderation practices at major internet platforms like Google and Facebook
The first part of the talk traces the contours of Silicon Valley work culture and probes the mechanisms through which anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQIA+ biases proliferate and impact the research and design process. The second part of the talk looks at automated content moderation at Google, examining the datasets and machine learning algorithms trained on them that power Google's SafeSearch functions and revealing stark anti-LGBTQIA+ biases encoded into Google's platform. The last part of the talk turns to Meta's policymaking surrounding its community guidelines and the human labor of implementing these policies on the Facebook platform. It shows how anti-LGBTQIA+ biases creep into Facebook's community guidelines at all levels, from the cloistered creation of narrow minded policy to the problematic enforcement of these policies by underpaid and overworked laborers (largely in the Global South). Across these three parts of the talk, I hope to show how heteronormativity is increasingly prominent in the coders, code, and policies that structure some of the internet's most dominant platforms, and thus heteronormativity has come to shape an ever-growing portion of our digital lives.
About Alexander Monea
Alexander Monea is Assistant Professor serving jointly in George Mason University's English Department and Cultural Studies PhD Program. He researches the social and cultural impact of computers and digital media. His recent book project The Digital Closet examines how heteronormative biases get embedded in the content moderation practices of internet platforms through automated computer vision algorithms, policymaking, community flagging, and human review. He is the co-author of The Prison House of the Circuit which examines the emergence of contemporary tactics of American governance alongside the emergence of digital circuits, the co-editor of Amazon: At the Intersection of Culture and Capital, as well as the author of numerous articles and book chapters. His future projects include creating an database, API, and browser extension to collect instances of LGBTQIA+ censorship online and a monograph based on his dissertation research that examines the role of large datasets in American apartheid governance.