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Porn Studies

ISSN: 2326-8743 (Print) 2326-8751 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprn20

Moderating the ‘worst of humanity’: sexuality,


witnessing, and the digital life of coloniality

Jacob Breslow

To cite this article: Jacob Breslow (2018): Moderating the ‘worst of humanity’: sexuality,
witnessing, and the digital life of coloniality, Porn Studies, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2018.1472034

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1472034

Published online: 06 Jun 2018.

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PORN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1472034

Moderating the ‘worst of humanity’: sexuality, witnessing, and


the digital life of coloniality
Jacob Breslow
Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY


An estimated 100,000 people worldwide work as content Received 4 August 2017
moderators, responding to the millions of photographs and Accepted 30 April 2018
videos uploaded online every minute. Primarily employed by
KEYWORDS
outsourcing companies in the Philippines, these labourers scrub Coloniality; content
social media of sexual content. This article unpacks what it calls moderation; pornography;
the ‘digital life of coloniality’ as it is produced through content witnessing; social media;
moderation along two lines of interrogation. The article initially outsourcing
suggests that the traditional understanding of the coming
together of sexuality, subjectivity, and regulation under
colonialism are rendered more complex by content moderation,
positioning the formerly colonized as regulators of their former
colonizers’ sexualities. Secondly, asking questions of witnessing,
ethics, and accountability, the article interrogates the lines of
disavowal and displacement which structure the offshoring of
violent, obscene, and mundane sexual content. Contributing to
the field of porn studies, this article suggests that the ambivalent
and multiple directions of sexual subject production within digital
coloniality be addressed anew.

Introduction
While official numbers are difficult to ascertain, there are, according to some reports, over
100,000 people worldwide whose job it is to moderate the hundreds of millions of photo-
graphs and videos uploaded, and statuses updated, every minute to various social media
sites.1 Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram all rely on what
Adrian Chen (2014) has called ‘an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of
humanity in order to protect the rest of us’. This work, what Sarah Roberts (2016) calls
‘commercial content moderation’, ranges in scale from the reading, filtering, and deleting
of written speech in comments and statuses (a process which, particularly with regards to
hate speech, has its own difficulties), to the viewing, flagging, and deleting of photographs
and videos of violence and sexual content. While new technologies are being developed
to do some of this work through algorithms and ‘PhotoDNA’,2 the majority of this labour is
undertaken by people employed by outsourcing companies in the Global South. Due to
different companies having different standards for what is or is not acceptable, and due
to these companies often relying on users to be the first line of call (reporting already

CONTACT Jacob Breslow j.breslow@lse.ac.uk Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and
Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. BRESLOW

uploaded content they deem inappropriate), flagged sexual content can include every-
thing from depictions of ‘female nipples’ and bodily fluids, to bestiality, child pornography,
mundane sexual expression, art, rape, and sexual torture. While some of this work is done
in the United States, often by temporary workers or low-paid sub-contractors, most of
these companies, Buni and Chemaly (2016) report, ‘consign their moderators to the
margins, shipping their platforms’ digital waste to “special economic zones” in the
Global South’. Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly’s use of the term ‘waste’ is an indicative
one. Indeed, the lines of movement from production to disposal of online content are
often the same ones, Roberts argues, which direct the flow of physical waste (and particu-
larly e-waste) as well. These digital lines of movement – facilitated by and made physical
through deep-sea cables that stretch around the globe – directly follow, Roberts writes,
the ‘well-worn circuits established during periods of formal colonial domination and con-
tinuing now, via mechanisms and processes that reify those circuits through economic,
rather than political or military, means’ (2016, 6). In other words, the circuits that transport
the gamut of sexual content flagged for moderation in the United States and elsewhere to
workers primarily based in India and the Philippines are part of the contemporary digital
life of coloniality, a coloniality which is, as has always been the case, structured through
and productive of sexuality.
In this article, I work to unpack the digital life of coloniality as it is produced through
commercial content moderation along two lines of interrogation, both of which are
specifically focused on the ways in which sexuality is structuring postcolonial relations
in this particular contemporary moment. My first contention is that under the digital life
of coloniality, the traditional understanding of the coming together of sexuality and regu-
lation under colonialism and coloniality is rendered far more complex. What does it mean, I
ask, that the contemporary regulation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sexual content – and particularly
of the content which is specifically available for users in the United States – is being under-
taken by workers in the Philippines, a former colony?3 Does the fact that this regulation of
American sexual content is done by people in a former US colony, rather than vice versa,
open up the ways in which sexuality must be understood in relation to colonial power? In
asking this question, however, my analysis necessarily turns to a second line of explication.
For my concern is not just, or not really, the issue of regulation (particularly as this question
of the direction of regulation between the United States and the Philippines is, and has
always been, rather complex). My analysis of the digital life of coloniality lies, rather, at
the level of affect and accountability. Here, in the second part of this article, I shift from
the question of regulation to that of witnessing, and I ask after the colonial lines of dis-
avowal and displacement which structure the offshoring of commercial content moder-
ation. For the offshoring of this labour is not just, I shall argue, a question of political
economy. It is, rather, a means of displacing the affective, ethical, and political act of wit-
nessing – and thus the questions of accountability which accompany this act – to former
colonies as well. Across this article, then, I contribute to the critical field of porn studies by
suggesting that the ambivalent and multiple directions of sexual subject production
within coloniality be interrogated anew in our scholarship. Doing so, I offer up a postco-
lonial critique with a focus on the digital to trouble the geopolitical locatedness of the
long-standing debates within and beyond feminism about obscenity, pornography, and
censorship.
PORN STUDIES 3

Close cultural ties


In his 2014 article for Wired, titled ‘The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of
Your Facebook Feed’, Chen documents what he calls a ‘vast, invisible pool of human
labour’ which is employed to scrub social media sites. Giving an account of the everyday
labour of Baybayan, an employee for TaskUs, an outsourcing company which operates
globally and which employs workers like Baybayan to moderate the app Whisper, Chen
writes:
Watching Baybayan’s work makes terrifyingly clear the amount of labour that goes into [mod-
erating] Whisper … He begins with a grid of posts, each of which is a rectangular photo, many
with bold text overlays … A list of categories, scrawled on a whiteboard, reminds the workers
of what they’re hunting for: pornography, gore, minors, sexual solicitation, sexual body parts/
images, racism. When Baybayan sees a potential violation, he drills in on it to confirm, then
sends it away – erasing it from the user’s account and the service altogether – and moves
back to the grid. Within 25 minutes, Baybayan has eliminated an impressive variety of dick
pics, thong shots, exotic objects inserted into bodies, hateful taunts, and requests for oral sex.

These labourers, Chen notes, are employed across a number of locations across the
globe, but, like Baybayan, they are predominantly based in the Philippines.4 This is so,
Chen (2014) writes, because the Philippines, as a former US colony, has ‘maintained
close cultural ties to the United States, which content moderation companies say
helps Filipinos determine what Americans find offensive’. Speaking about the ‘upsurge’
of outsourcing in the Philippines, an upsurge which recently saw the Philippines
surpass India as the world’s leading site of outsourced labour, Emmanuel David writes
that this shift to the Philippines ‘has been shaped, in part, by the country’s long
history as a US colony. It boasts a sizable English-speaking population, one with a
vexed postcolonial relation to American culture’ (2016, 382). As David and others note,
it is this particular postcolonial relation to American culture that is often used as justifica-
tion for the bulk of this labour being done for low cost in the Philippines (see Isaac 2017).5
Content moderators in the Philippines often make in a day what some US-based modera-
tors will make in an hour.
The colonial connection between the United States and the Philippines is an important
one, employers argue, because the task of content moderation requires a particular –
understood as exceptionally American – ethical sensibility. Much of this sensibility is, as
one might expect, wrapped up in heteronormativity, familial respectability, reproductive
futurity, and Catholic moralizing. As Buni and Chemaly (2016) write, for example, You-
Tube’s Safety, Quality, and User Advocacy Department assess content through the follow-
ing question: ‘Can I share this video with my family?’ Clearly, a particular familial
respectability is at play here, as numerous reports have come out over the last couple
years about YouTube (as well as other companies) flagging and restricting LGBT
content in a bid to make their sites more ‘kid friendly’ (Chokshi 2017). Yet the forms of
desire and sexuality that are being regulated through content moderation do not so
easily fit within a heteronormative, or even homophobic, frame. According to Barnett
and Hollingshead (2012), Facebook has a ‘fascinatingly strict set of guidelines determining
what should be deleted’. Sounding like a convoluted version of Gayle Rubin’s (1984)
charmed circle, these guidelines stipulate that:
4 J. BRESLOW

Pictures of naked private parts, […] and sexual activity (apart from foreplay) are all banned.
Male nipples are OK, but naked breastfeeding is not. Photographs of bodily fluids (except
semen) are allowed, but not if a human being is also shown.

According to Facebook’s own ‘community standards’ (as of June 2017), ‘photographs of


people displaying genitals or focusing in on fully exposed buttocks’ are regularly
removed, and images of ‘female breasts’ are restricted ‘if they include the nipple’, but
an exception is now made for photographs of women ‘actively engaged in breastfeeding
or showing breasts with post-mastectomy scarring’. Here, the ambivalence surrounding
the nipple and the sexed body it is attached to, activities it is engaged in, and surgery it
has undergone, as well as the rapid shifts in the distinction of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ content
between 2012 and 2017, make clear the hyper-responsiveness and vacillation of the indus-
try and the difficulties of this type of labour. Yet it is apparently these particular ‘American’
sexual and cultural values that workers in the Philippines share, making the placement of
this work there not just economical, but ‘logical’ too.
In one of the more interesting accounts of the decision-making process behind the
moderating of images, Buni and Chemaly discuss their interview with Charlotte Willner,
the Safety Manager at Pinterest, wherein she recounts the ways in which moderation pol-
icies had to shift after the success of Fifty Shades of Grey:
[Charlotte] and her team were hustling to develop new BDSM standards. ‘We realized,’ she
later explained by email, ‘that we were going to need to figure out standards for rape and kid-
napping fantasy content, which we hadn’t seen a lot of but we began to see in connection
with the general BDSM influx.’ The calls were not easy, but it was clear that her team was
making decisions on a remarkably granular level. One user was posting fetish comments
about cooking Barbie-size women in a stew pot. Should this be allowed? Why not? (Buni
and Chemaly 2016)

While it was agreed that the images could remain – they were deemed implausible as a
practical threat, as ‘a full-size woman can’t fit into stew pot, the team figured’ – I highlight
this example because it is a clear indication of the type of ethical decision-making, and
sexual moralizing, that content moderators do on a daily basis.6 While Charlotte is
based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, the policies that her team (and teams like hers
at other companies) create become standard practice for workers in the Philippines.
What I am most interested in exploring here is how the colonial relation allows for, or
justifies, the particular type of work that these content moderators do to be ‘best placed’ in
the Philippines. Why, in relation to this latter example of Pinterest, for example, is the initial
ethical call made in the United States, while the everyday labour of enforcing this decision
is facilitated by outsourced labour? What, specifically, does this outsourcing tell us about
how sexual regulation is facilitated by, and facilitates, the digital life of coloniality? For
indeed, part of what is interesting here is that the outsourcing of this labour clearly
shifts who is traditionally understood as undertaking the work and burden of policing –
blocking, censoring, flagging, erasing, and blurring –sexuality. Returning to Rubin’s
seminal ‘Thinking Sex’ from 1984, it is clear that the sites of institutional and interpersonal
power which defined and policed erotic hysteria in the United States (ranging from the
Supreme Court, to the field of psychology, to popular culture and the family) now also
need to include technology companies and the outsourced workers who undertake the
quotidian labour of moderating digital expression. Rubin’s analysis, which mostly
PORN STUDIES 5

ignores the imbrication of sex panic with racialization and colonialism (perhaps a product
of an affinity for Foucault), is still a useful framework for thinking through the effects of
content moderation. Yet, in order to have a more in-depth understanding of what is at
stake here, our analysis cannot take the ‘nation’ as a coherent, sealed-off entity in the
same way Rubin does, particularly if this means not including outsourced labourers as
central to the techniques of sexual surveillance and prohibition. Following Victor Román
Mendoza’s (2015) call to interrogate the ‘metroimperial’ fantasy of the US ‘nation’ as a
bounded, bordered entity not actively engaged in imperial (dis)possession, I want to con-
sider this outsourced labour as fundamental to, and co-constitutive of, the regulation of
sexual moralism within and beyond the space of the ‘nation’. Indeed Mendoza, who is
interested in the colonial relation between the United States and the Philippines
around the turn of the twentieth century, argues that the United States needs to be under-
stood as a metroimperial project produced through ‘synchronic legal, material, ideological,
cultural, and social exchanges across transpacific space’ (2015, 9). This framing opens up
Rubin’s intervention to transpacific processes of regulation.
Doing so requires an analysis of colonial sexual regulation that departs from much of
the wider scholarship on sexuality and coloniality. While there has, of course, been a
history of scholarship which has discussed the multiple, hybrid, and contested ways in
which sexuality, gender, and race have structured the subject production of the colonizer
under colonialism, and in the wake of coloniality (Fanon 1967; Spivak 1988; Bhabha 1991;
Stoler 1995; Woollacott 1999), this subject production is most often understood as emer-
ging from the regulations which were specifically directed at the colonized. For example,
Monique Mulholland’s (2016) insightful analysis of the 2007 restrictions of access to por-
nography in many of Australia’s Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory points
out the ways in which the uneven enactment of zones of pornography prohibition
(under the guise of child protection) functioned as a colonizing technique of control
and pathologization. As Mulholland argues, the restrictions on pornography, which
were only enforced in Aboriginal communities, were precisely about controlling and reg-
ulating displaced indigenous communities. Similarly, in M. Jacqui Alexander’s (1994) analy-
sis of sexual citizenship in Trinidad and Tobago, the state policing of sexuality (and
particularly non-reproductive and lesbian and gay sex) is also an effect of colonization,
albeit under different terms. In her analysis, that is, the anxieties about the sovereignty
and salience of the newly postcolonial independent republic led Trinidad and Tobago
to reassert national sovereignty through an increased regulation of non-heteronormative
sexuality. I highlight these two examples both because they are particularly compelling
analyses of the workings of sexuality under conditions of coloniality, and because they
are indicative of the way in which scholarship has come to understand the orientation
of power in relation to colonialism (see also McClintock 1995; Povinelli 1997; Levine
2000; Puri 2014). For these scholars, the colonial and postcolonial life of sexual subjectivity
directs restriction, violence, stigma, and othering at currently and formerly colonized
populations.
What I am arguing in relationship to content moderation, however, is that the sexual
regulation which is taking place under the digital life of coloniality, while still being facili-
tated through, a tactic of, and justified under colonial and postcolonial power, is a regu-
lation that is specifically directed at the sexualities of the former colonizers. Unpacking
this statement is not to argue for a re-centring of the colonizer, nor to argue that
6 J. BRESLOW

Americans are somehow the victims of their colonizing of the Philippines. Nor is it to
suggest that content moderation does not also follow traditional lines of power and
sexual subjection. Indeed, one of the complex effects of content moderation is the
ambivalent production of a very particular range of sexualities for the workers in the Phi-
lippines. Chen (2014), discussing the psychological effects of content moderation, relays
this in the following account of his conversation with Denise, a psychologist who consults
for two different content moderation companies in the Philippines. Speaking to the issue
of high employee turnover, he writes:
Workers quit because they feel desensitized by the hours of pornography they watch each day
and no longer want to be intimate with their spouses. Others report a supercharged sex drive.
‘How would you feel watching pornography for eight hours a day, every day?’ Denise says.
‘How long can you take that?’

The act of moderating, in other words, is in and of itself a sexual one. It produces a com-
plicated sexual subjectivity. As this quote makes clear, workers undertaking this labour
become ‘desensitized’, their intimate and affective bonds with their partners become rup-
tured, or, alternatively, intensified. The very act of witnessing this material becomes
ingrained within the psyches and subjectivities of these workers. As I shall argue in the
latter half of this article, regulating digital space is thus an act of curtailing an exposure
to sexual imagery in one place, while producing a hyper-sexualized environment in
another.
While this sexual subjectivity may not be premised on, or productive of, an outright
pathologizing of ‘Filipino sexuality’, it does, nonetheless, clearly produce a perhaps
ambivalent libidinal effect. It also follows, as I argue via Mendoza in the following, a
longer historical co-production of the hyper-sexualized racial-sexual Filipino subject and
the queerness of American desires. In this way, content moderation is as much a reversal
of the usual framework for understanding the direction of sexual colonial regulation as it is
the production of an ambivalent sexual subjectivity in the former colony. As such, my insis-
tence on interrogating the multiple orientations of this regulation is precisely because
there are continued forms of economic, psychic, and social relations of dependency, resist-
ance, and elicitation which are facilitated through the quotidian acts of regulating the
American sexual appetite. My opening up the digital life of coloniality to interruption
and interrogation is thus a call for the scholarship on sexuality and coloniality to continue
to unpack the multi-directionality of regulation under coloniality.
The scholarship which has already undertaken this line of interrogation provides a
useful framework for thinking this through. Mendoza, for example, argues that ‘the
kinds of intimate and even perverse relations between the figure of the Philippine
subject and other people that emerge[d]’ under American colonization in the Philippines
were ‘not peripheral or contrary to the hetero-masculinizing, genocidal project of U.S.
imperialism but constitutive of it’ (2015, 2). Mendoza documents how the American colo-
nial administration of the Philippines specifically targeted and pathologized American
sexuality through the close regulation of the sexual health of American soldiers. While
the typical colonial and Orientalist discourse of the tropical environment of the Philippines
inciting ‘dangerous erotic impulses’ (2015, 55) in otherwise innocent American soldiers
was operating at the time, it was additionally compounded, Mendoza argues, by a
concern over the questionable sexual morals of the American soldiers who wished to
PORN STUDIES 7

enlist their services in the Philippines. A central discursive consequence of the policing of
American soldiers’ sexual health was the production of a wider framing of the American
populace as having questionable sexual morals, and poor sexual hygiene prior to their
enlistment. While this regulatory orientation should fundamentally be understood as a
lack of concern for the sexual health and well-being of Filipinos under colonial adminis-
tration, it is important not to understate the implications of this discourse of American
sexual deviance, which was produced through the act of colonization.
For Mendoza, then, the racial–sexual production which was central to the colonial
administration of the Philippines pathologized, criminalized, and co-constituted both Fili-
pino and American sexualities. This transpacific stigmatization of queer and non-norma-
tive sexualities differs, in that sense, from other accounts of the multi-dimensionality of
colonial sexual regulation which frame the orienting of power’s normalizing grasp
towards the colonizers as a form of bourgeois, racial–sexual cultivation instead. In the
most notable example of this, Ann Laura Stoler argues that, on one hand, ‘the regulatory
mechanisms of the [European] colonial state were directed not only at the colonized, but
as forcefully at “internal enemies” within the heterogeneous population that comprised
the category of Europeans themselves’ (1995, 96). On the other hand, Stoler argues,
these regulatory mechanisms at play within Europe established ‘new interventions in
the governing of the self [which] legitimate[d] increasing intervention in the ethics of
conduct, geared to the management of “how to live”’ (1995, 96–97). For Stoler, the ‘man-
agement and knowledge of home environments, childrearing practices, and sexual
arrangements of European colonials’ (1995, 97) was precisely a project of the cultivation
of the European bourgeois body. Both Mendoza and Stoler, then, argue that understand-
ing the imbrication of sexuality and coloniality requires thinking about the multiple direc-
tions of regulation and subject production which are central to sustaining and proliferating
colonial logics.
Arguably, the labour of content moderation should also be understood as a project of
normative sexual cultivation facilitated by coloniality. The colonial logics of ‘protection’,
expelling ‘waste’, and establishing an ‘ethics’ of healthy digital conduct underscore the
biopolitical civilizing project of this labour. Chen’s (2014) earlier statement that content
moderators ‘soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us’ works
exactly within this vein, as it clearly positions the ‘us’ of this arrangement as a particularly
located population deserving of, and benefitting from, the precarious labour of distantly
placed others. Here, then, the ‘close cultural ties’ that bind the United States and the Phi-
lippines are the same conditions which justify the separation of ‘us’ from ‘them’ (see Mirch-
andani 2012). The discursive construction of an ‘almost the same but not quite’ (Bhabha
1991, 122) Filipino racial–sexual subject produces an ambivalent mimesis premised on
exploitation, distance, and invisibilization.
In this vein, what differentiates Stoler’s context and my own – besides the obvious
differences in geopolitical context and temporal location – is indeed the invisibility and
effacement of the regulation which is being undertaken in the contemporary digital life
of coloniality. Unlike the authors and publishers who produced, wrote, and distributed
colonial household manuals across Europe, for example, the labourers scrubbing the inter-
net of certain sexual content are relatively unknown and invisibilized. Speaking about the
concealing of this labour, Roberts suggests that ‘If there’s not an explicit campaign to hide
it, there’s certainly a tacit one. […] It goes to our misunderstandings about the Internet and
8 J. BRESLOW

our view of technology as being somehow magically not human’ (as quoted in Chen 2014).
Similarly, Stone (2010) writes:
Internet companies are reluctant to discuss the particulars of content moderation, since they
would rather not draw attention to the unpleasantness that their sites can attract. […] Out-
sourcing companies are also reluctant to discuss the business on the record, since their
clients demand confidentiality.

This effacement is important, I argue, because it indicates that more is taking place in
the offshoring of this labour than simply the ‘necessary’ regulation of sexual content, and
the financial incentives for technology companies. More is at stake, that is, than the mis-
conception that the internet is a magical posthuman zone of possibility. There is, as I shall
show in the following section, a fundamental difference between how content moderators
approach sexual content and other political content (often by allowing the ‘properly pol-
itical’ material to remain available for users while erasing any and all sexual content). It is
because of this that the invisibility of this labour seems to function less in relation to the
myth of the internet, and more as a disavowal of the very humanness of sexual violence
and a displacement of the traumatic psychological effects of ‘cleaning up’ humanity’s
digital footprint.

The displacement of witnessing


It is precisely this line of questioning which leads me to the analysis that forms the rest of
this article: that of witnessing and accountability. In what remains of this article, I bring
together my earlier discussion on the sexual regulation at play within coloniality’s
digital life with the scholarship on witnessing to explore what is at stake in the outsourcing
of content moderation along the lines of trauma, affect, and accountability. Doing so
requires thinking across various scales and effects of traumas, and it entails risking a slip-
page into abolitionist perspectives on pornography, and into a sex negativity, which I do
not subscribe to. Despite these risks, which I discuss further in the following, I undertake
this line of questioning because I am interested in parsing out the psychic and political
work that offshoring allows in relation to witnessing and being accountable for the
‘worst’ of humanity.
As a way of making more clear this shift from the multi-directionality of regulation
under the digital life of coloniality to the questions of affect, trauma, and witnessing
which I am arguing are absolutely entangled with the outsourcing of content moderation,
let me return to Babayan, the labourer I introduced at the start of the article. Describing his
first encounter with Babayan, Chen writes:
The campuses of the tech industry are famous for their lavish cafeterias, cushy shuttles, and
on-site laundry services. But on a muggy February afternoon, some of these companies’
most important work is being done 7,000 miles away, on the second floor of a former elemen-
tary school at the end of a row of auto mechanics’ stalls in Bacoor, a gritty Filipino town 13
miles southwest of Manila. … In a large room packed with workers manning PCs on long
tables, I meet Michael Baybayan, an enthusiastic 21-year-old with a jaunty pouf of reddish-
brown hair. If the space does not resemble a typical startup’s office, the image on Baybayan’s
screen does not resemble typical startup work: It appears to show a super-close-up photo of a
two-pronged dildo wedged in a vagina. I say appears because I can barely begin to make sense
PORN STUDIES 9

of the image, a baseball-card-sized abstraction of flesh and translucent pink plastic, before he
disappears it with a casual flick of his mouse. (2014; emphasis added)

As I argued earlier, this is labour that is clearly intended to regulate the borders of sexuality
online. It is labour, as Chen writes, that social media companies have depended on in order
to grow into a multibillion-dollar industry; it is labour which ‘ensure[s] that Grandma never
has to see images like the one Babayan just nuked’. Leaving this image available for users
to view, it is argued, would not only turn users away from the site, it would create a user
experience that is disruptive, unpleasant, and traumatic. As such, someone – 7000 miles
away, in a former colony, in a formerly used school – is employed to erase it. But what
is the work that this erasing does? Can it really be said that this outsourced labour success-
fully mitigates the trauma produced through the witnessing of an image such as this? In
what follows, I begin to answer these questions along two lines of analysis. First, I turn to
the scholarship on witnessing to complicate the very demand that ‘traumatic’ images go
unseen. Second, I argue that due to the very nature of the labour of content moderation,
the assumption that erasing this image is successful in mitigating the alleged harm of the
image cannot be sustained. It is precisely because this harm cannot be contained and is
reproduced through the very labour of erasing it, I argue, that this labour is relegated
to invisibilized workers living in the margins.
To make sense of this argument, it is necessary to turn to scholarship on the ethics of
witnessing. In the wake of images and testimonies of death and torture of those who were
forcibly sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust, a long-standing area of philo-
sophical questioning has centred around what it means to be a witness to horror, violence,
and suffering (Felman and Laub 1992; Agamben 1999; Sontag 2003). The scholarship on
the ethics of being a witness to trauma has since expanded both to challenge the central-
ity of the Holocaust as the exceptional European urtext of unimaginable violence (Levy
and Sznaider 2006; Levi 2007; Hirsch and Spitzer 2009; Rothberg 2009) and to interrogate
the act of witnessing in relation to other violences of many kinds: the trauma of colonial
dispossession (Hutcheon 2003; Craps and Buelens 2008), the 11 September terror attacks
(Zelizer 2002), images of lynching (Polchin 2007), domestic violence (Herman 1992; Henke
1998; Kilby 2007), and the torture at Abu Ghraib (Puar 2004; Feldman 2005; Mirzoeff 2006).
Within this scholarship, one of the central ethical questions of bearing witness is the shift
from the individualized act of seeing an image, or listening to a testimony, and what Barbie
Zelizer describes as the ‘adoption of a public stance by which they [individuals] become
part of a collective working through trauma together’ (2002, 52).
In a foundational sense, content moderators – and the companies which employ them
and which set the guidelines for their labour – are already knowingly aware of their work’s
ethical relationship to the act of witnessing. Buni and Chemaly (2016) use the language of
bearing witness, for example, to write about the swift policy shifts that were undertaken at
YouTube in the midst of the 2009 protests in Iran against the presidential victory of
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
On June 20th [2009], the [YouTube Safety, Quality, and User Advocacy Department] team was
confronted with a video depicting the death of a young woman named Neda Agha-Soltan.
The 26-year-old had been struck by a single bullet to the chest during demonstrations
against pro-government forces and a shaky cell-phone video captured her horrific last
moments: in it, blood pours from her eyes, pooling beneath her. Within hours of the
10 J. BRESLOW

video’s upload, it became a focal point for Mora-Blanco [a former YouTube employee] and her
team. As she recalls, the guidelines they’d developed offered no clear directives regarding
what constituted newsworthiness or what, in essence, constituted ethical journalism involving
graphic content and the depiction of death. But she knew the video had political significance
and was aware that their decision would contribute to its relevance. Mora-Blanco and her col-
leagues ultimately agreed to keep the video up.

Similar stories are relayed by various reporters and content moderators, about whether or
not moderators should allow or delete images and footage of the Arab Spring, police kill-
ings of black people, people in blackface, beheadings, as well as, according to a leaked
Facebook moderation document, posts by Kurdish users who are critical of the Turkish
government (Chen 2017). As with the decision about the footage of Agha-Soltan’s
death, for the most part, violent imagery that companies allow to be an exception to
their policy’s bans are justified based on the content’s ‘newsworthiness’. In a telling
passage that links this very journalistic politics of witnessing with a neoliberal panic sur-
rounding the democratization of content in the digital era, Buni and Chemaly relay You-
Tube’s logic for allowing the footage:
It [the video] was fuelling important conversations about free speech and human rights on a
global scale and was quickly turning into a viral symbol of the movement. It had tremendous
political power. They had tremendous political power. And the clip was already available else-
where, driving massive traffic to competing platforms. (Buni and Chemaly 2016; original
emphasis)

In commercial content moderation, decisions about what to show, and what exceptions to
make, are thus not just tied to the ethics of the image, they are also explicitly linked to
brand management and neoliberal competition. In this context, Agha-Soltan’s death lit-
erally becomes a product which YouTube cannot afford not to sell.7
Nonetheless, the questions that are asked here about witnessing are important ones,
particularly as the immediacy of the digital image, and the global reach of social media,
intensifies what Ariella Azoulay (2008) calls the photograph’s potential for political
‘encounter’. Azoulay, writing about the increasingly ‘widespread use of cameras by
people around the world’, argues that the growing multitude of images has ‘created a
new form of encounter, an encounter between people who take, watch, and show
other people’s photographs, with or without their consent, thus opening new possibilities
of political action and forming new conditions for its visibility’ (2008, 24). It is precisely this
twinned effect of the image – allowing the bearing of witness to trauma, and opening up
new forms of alliance – which allegedly underscores the complex labour of human mod-
eration. ‘Nailing down the ineffable question of why one piece of content is acceptable but
a slight variation breaks policy’, Buni and Chemaly (2016) write, ‘remains the holy grail of
moderation’. It is the difficulty in settling this precise yet murky distinction which requires
human, rather than algorithmic, labour.
What is consistent across these accounts of companies negotiating the ethics of the
image, however, is that they only pertain to a particular form of political violence. No
debate appears to be had, that is, about what the ethics of witnessing sexual violence
or sexual expression are. In a post titled ‘Facebook’s Community Standards: How and
Where We Draw the Line’, Monika Bickert (2017), the Head of Global Policy Management
at Facebook, explains the complexities of content moderation. In her explanation,
PORN STUDIES 11

however, the practices for moderating violent footage of a chemical weapons attack are
given context and justification, while the logics behind regulating sexuality are mostly
taken for granted. She writes:
Last month, people shared several horrific videos on Facebook of Syrian children in the after-
math of a chemical weapons attack. The videos, which also appeared elsewhere on the inter-
net, showed the children shaking, struggling to breathe and eventually dying. The images
were deeply shocking – so much so that we placed a warning screen in front of them. But
the images also prompted international outrage and renewed attention on the plight of
Syrians. Reviewing online material on a global scale is challenging and essential. … The
cases we review aren’t the easy ones: they are often in a grey area where people disagree.
Art and pornography aren’t always easily distinguished, but we’ve found that digitally gener-
ated images of nudity are more likely to be pornographic than handmade ones, so our policy
reflects that. (Bickert 2017)

Echoing the discussion of the merits of hosting the video of Agha-Soltan’s death earlier,
here Bickert acknowledges both the journalistic merit of hosting violent footage of
warfare and the necessity of remaining competitive. Complex thought seems to be
going into the debate about whether or not the potential trauma that this footage
might evoke is justified by the urgency of the circumstances of its production and disse-
mination. In contrast, the realm of the pornographic is given no consideration as such.
Knowingly pornographic, and knowingly inappropriate, the material which blurs the line
between art and pornography is deemed meritless. Here, distinguishing between art
and pornography is understood to be a complex act, and yet the implicit implication of
assessing something as pornography is that it should therefore necessarily be removed.
There are seemingly no instances in which sexual content is understood as politically
useful to show. Unlike (political) violence, pornography (however defined) is not under-
stood to have social or political value.8
While this may, of course, be understood as simply a brand-management question, or a
legal one – with anti-obscenity laws prohibiting the displaying of, hosting of, and access to
certain sexual images across various websites and apps – there are two important things to
keep in mind here. The first is that, as feminist scholars have argued for decades (Brown-
miller 1975; Kappeler 1986; Crenshaw 1993; Kilby 2007; Woodiwiss 2014), there are impor-
tant, albeit difficult, questions of testimony, witnessing, and accountability which
accompany narratives and images of sexual abuse and survivorship. For Lynn Higgins
and Brenda Silver (1991), editors of the collection Rape and Representation, the questions
of witnessing and testimony are indeed central to understanding what is currently referred
to as ‘rape culture’. They argue that testimony, in particular, is fundamental to the ways in
which rape and sexual violence ‘have been so ingrained and so rationalized through their
representations’ (1991, 2), because women’s own testimonies about surviving rape are so
often discredited. For Higgins and Silver, the fact that ‘representations of rape after the
event are almost always framed by a masculine perspective premised on men’s fantasies
about female sexuality and their fears of accusation, as well as their codified access to and
possession of women’s bodies’ (1991, 2), necessitates seeking out new ‘rhetorical strat-
egies whereby rape gets represented in spite of (or through) its suppression’ (1991, 4).
They thus argue for a critical commitment to being a witness to rape testimony, and to
taking it seriously as evidence of a physical, sexual violation that is a product of the ‘obses-
sive inscription – and [the] obsessive erasure – of sexual violence against women and
12 J. BRESLOW

those placed by society in the position of “woman”’ (1991, 2). Being a critically engaged
and generous witness to this testimony, in other words, opens up possibilities for
empathy, trust, and accountability.
While Higgins and Silver are thus interested in thinking through the potentials of
‘rereading rape’ at the textual level, Tanya Horeck’s work on representations of rape,
real and fictionalized, situates the politics of witnessing rape and sexual violence in relation
to the image. Horeck (2004) specifically addresses the 1983 gang rape of a 21-year-old
woman at a bar called Big Dan’s, which occurred as the patrons of the bar cheered,
laughed, and goaded it on. The ensuing rape trials – at which the defence attorneys
used the survivor’s sexual history to blame her for her own rape – were among the first
ever court cases to be nationally broadcast live on television. Both the rape itself and
the trials additionally found a site of re-presentation, as they became the basis for a
1988 feature film, The Accused (Kaplan 1998). Despite what might be understood as an
excess of representation, one of Horeck’s central arguments about the Big Dan’s rape
case is that the initial rape itself was premised on a failure of witnessing; the bar
patrons relayed their proximity to the rape as mere ‘spectators’, not as ‘witnesses’. None
of them called for help or intervened. As such, the broadcasting and re-presenting of
the rape, both on live television and in fictionalized filmic form, signalled a particular
paradox: ‘a case that received extensive publicity because it exposed a communal
failure to witness a woman’s rape, inaugurates a form of representation premised on
the idea that communal looking serves the ends of civic justice’ (Horeck 2004, 85).
Horeck, drawing upon Ruby Rich (1983), asks: ‘how can looking cure the damage
caused by looking?’ (2004, 97). This case illuminates, Horeck argues, that there is a funda-
mental ‘crisis’ at the heart of witnessing. While witnessing is premised on, and perhaps
allows for, communal empathy and accountability, it often requires the very same act –
that of looking – which was foundational to the initial violence itself. As such, witnessing
is not a straightforward act of accountability or ethics. Rather, it is a deeply ambivalent act
which can simultaneously engender politically mobilizing active empathy and engender
violent participation.
Linking these two accounts back to content moderation, it is clear that the notion that
flagged pornographic imagery is already knowingly unethical, and thus does not require a
conversation about bearing witness to it, elides both the ethical imperative that witnessing
and testimony call forth, and the ambivalences around looking which are central to the
image. I need to be careful here in how I articulate this point, as my intention is not to
flatten out all pornography, or indeed all sexual imagery (for flagged digital content is
capacious in its breadth and intensity), as somehow equally and unequivocally violent.
Nor am I suggesting that Facebook, for example, is necessarily the most appropriate
place to hold such a debate. However, rather than attempt to resolve these difficulties
here, I want instead to raise the second element which is central to the ways in which
content moderation addresses these very questions. It is important to remember, that
is, that while these images are removed from view for users of these websites and apps
– and thus these questions of testimony, witnessing, and looking are evaded, at least
somewhat, for ‘us’ – there are still people around the globe, like Babayan, who view,
review, and re-view these images on a daily basis. These very questions of looking and wit-
nessing, in other words, are not resolved by the offshoring of content moderation to
various outsourcing companies in the Philippines. The act of looking is in fact absolutely
PORN STUDIES 13

central to their daily labour.9 As such, rather than argue for a straightforward resolution to
the ‘crisis’ in witnessing, I am arguing that the particular postcolonial relation that is facili-
tated by content moderation instigates a form of labour that displaces the very potential
for witnessing to an elsewhere that sits ‘beyond’ the nation but firmly within the grasp of
the metroimperial. The relegation of content moderation to invisibilized precarious
labourers in the Global South is thus, I am arguing, less about the political economy of
content moderation, as social media sites might claim, and instead precisely about dis-
avowing and displacing acts of witness and their inherent potential for instigating
empathy and accountability onto a postcolonial other.

Conclusion: witnessing elsewhere


Returning to Zelizer’s argument that one of the preconditions for witnessing (rather than
spectating) is the formation of a collective who works through trauma together, it is impor-
tant to consider that because the labour of moderating takes place in an invisibilized ‘else-
where’, no collective, beyond these labourers, can form. Even for these labourers,
collectivity seems precluded:
Without visible consequences here and largely unseen, companies dump child abuse and por-
nography, crush porn, animal cruelty, acts of terror, and executions – images so extreme those
paid to view them won’t even describe them in words to their loved ones – onto people des-
perate for work. And there they sit in crowded rooms at call centers, or alone, working off-site
behind their screens and facing cyber-reality, as it is being created. (Buni and Chemaly 2016)

There is no way to know exactly what the consequences of the displacement of witnessing
into siloed, marginalized communities ‘elsewhere’ might be for the pervasiveness of sexual
violence in the United States, or for the possibilities and limitations of transpacific alliances
premised on survivorship, accountability, and harm prevention. Nor, unfortunately, is defi-
nitively forging these links possible within the realm of this article. Rather, I conclude with
two suggestions for future research. First, one of the implications of my argument for cen-
tring the labour of content moderation within porn studies is the recognition that, in the
digital age, coming down on the prohibition side of the sex wars debate does not end the
ambivalence of looking relations. The flagging, filtering, and prohibiting of digital sexual
content may dramatically limit the reach of that content ‘here’, but the work of cleaning
up the internet (a global care chain of a different kind) simply displaces where the
effects of these images are felt, not that they are. Second, as I have been arguing, the impli-
cations of studying pornography under what I have been calling the ‘digital life of coloni-
ality’ require that we think anew about the multiple directions and effects of power,
subjectivity, and labour at play in regulating the proliferation of sexualities online.

Notes
1. According to Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global product policy, Facebook users
flagged more than one million items of content for review every day in 2016 (Buni and
Chemaly 2016).
2. PhotoDNA is a technology developed by Microsoft that uses a technique called ‘robust
hashing’ which creates a digital fingerprint for an image. This then matches it to other
copies of that same image, even if the image has been altered. It was developed to track
the spread of child pornography across the internet.
14 J. BRESLOW

3. Content moderation is more of a fragmented process than I am able to account for here. It
includes workers located within in-house departments at various technology companies, out-
sourcing firms, call centres, and micro-labour sites, as well as ‘untold numbers of algorithmic
and automated products’ (Buni and Chemaly 2016).
4. While content moderation is thus a form of outsourced labour, it is not exactly the same job as
working in a call centre, the more traditional understanding of this type of work. Despite their
differences, however, both of these industries can be understood together though an analysis
of their shared political economy, and their emergence in certain geopolitical locations, from
specific colonial relations.
5. For other analyses of the American colonial administration of the Philippines, see, among
others, Go (2008), Rafael (2000), and Westling (2011).
6. Eventually, Buni and Chemaly (2016) write, ‘the “stew pot guy” began uploading more explicit
content that clearly violated Pinterest’s terms and [the] team removed his account’.
7. For an analysis of the circulation of the footage of Agha-Soltan’s death, one which questions
why this footage of death, rather than, say, the footage of Oscar Grant’s murder, functioned as
a global catalyst for action and empathy, see Malkowski (2017).
8. Reviewers and readers of this article have similarly asked me to define and differentiate
between pornography, sexual imagery, sexual expression, and sexual content. While I agree
with Bickert here that careful analysis and contextualization is necessary for such an act, I hes-
itate to make such a distinction within this piece precisely because of the ways in which, as
within this quote from Bickert, the lines between art and pornography are blurred by social
media companies. Rather than attempt to resolve slippages in my own writing between
these different (yet overlapping) formulations, I am seeking to emphasize their slipperiness.
For it is precisely the ways in which they are produced as slippery signifiers (mundane
sexual expression for one becomes pornography for another) that they are able to take on
so much work in terms of affect, accountability, and politicization.
9. While one could thus argue that content moderators’ reviewing and re-viewing of images of
sexual abuse, particularly child sexual abuse, might engender re-traumatization – particularly
given that one of the central arguments made against child pornography is that the child’s
knowledge of the image’s circulation and viewing by others is in and of itself a form of
trauma (Oswell 2006; Smolen 2013) – this is not my intent here.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank two anonymous readers and the reading group at the Department of
Gender Studies, London School of Economics who provided invaluable feedback on an earlier
version of the article.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Jacob Breslow http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8643-9804

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