Ethical Frameworks in Moderating Online "Sexual Content": Implications for Technical Communication & Social Justice for Hypermarginalized Users

This dissertation attempts to advocate for and address an issue that impacts hypermarginalized communities online: platform governance. Specifically, the author researches the documents (Terms of Service [ToS] and community guidelines) that are then enacted through content moderation practices to better understand the ethical frameworks used to moderate “sexual content” on the internet. Overall, this dissertation expands on the intersection between queer rhetoric, social justice, and ethics as TPC concerns. Through this study, stakeholders can have more nuanced conversations around content moderation and ethical decision-making, especially dealing with “sexual content” used to exclude marginalized and hypermarginalized users, and to interrogate inclusion/exclusion in online spaces. This data can assist advocacy work for sex work decriminalization and give users insight into a system generally kept behind closed doors. This dissertation’s primary research question is: How can practitioners in TPC and rhetoric (mis)understand and (mis)use ethical frameworks for upholding ToS and community guidelines on social media platforms through moderating “sexual content,” and what impacts does that have on the inclusion/exclusion of hypermarginalized communities? Through a corpus of 176 unique terms of service and community guidelines documents, this study found varying definitions of sexual content ranging from more open and generalizable definitions to the complete omission of “sexual content.” Regardless of the specific (or lacking) definition of “sexual content,” the author found that in many cases, the rules and guidance outlined in ToS and community guidelines documents do have ethical meaning, especially when taken as part of the larger networked assemblage of content moderation as a whole. The author also conducted semi-structured interviews with content moderators. Through interviews with 17 content moderators, the author was able to learn about the various ethical frameworks that content moderators were utilizing themselves, upholding for the platform, and/or in tension with, giving me insight into how engaging ethical frameworks can teach us more about both hypermarginalized communities’ and content moderators’ flourishing in online spaces. The author was able to learn more about both the content moderation infrastructure and the impact on content moderation decision-making, online communities, and moderators themselves.