Book Review: Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing

showing how processes which may seem complex and technical are in fact complex and human. Internal teams within companies make impossible decisions daily about what to permit and how to word and implement standards. Paid contractors review flagged content for violations at compensation rates of fractions of a cent per image. Volunteer user moderators manage whole communities for no compensation beyond a sense of contributing to something meaningful. Though it would be impossible for humans to moderate all content on Facebook, an enormous number of large and small decisions are far out of reach for algorithms. Following the discussion of the aforementioned breastfeeding photo saga and the complexities of decisions on whether to filter or remove different types of content, Gillespie closes with a discussion of the future of content moderation. Platforms sit in an unenviable position where users expect both protection from other users and the freedom to express themselves as they see fit. The current system may be technically viable moving into the future, at least if companies are given the opportunity to hire small armies of content moderator contractors, but it is certainly not politically viable given ever-growing pressure from different stakeholders with conflicting interests. In the final chapter, Gillespie summarizes the heart of his argument where he presents possible avenues to address some of the major problems in content moderation. Readers following the debates about content moderation will be familiar with some of Gillespie’s recommendations, such as his call for more diversity in platform hires and a shift toward new business models, but there are a few details that push common discussion points in new directions. For example, Gillespie recommends building transparency directly into user interfaces, where unobtrusive notices could help us understand moderation-related actions happening around us. Similarly, he suggests that users might benefit from the fruits of their own moderation labor, which in this case means accessing aggregated data about what has been flagged. These are both categories of features that are plausible to implement and benefit users without giving up too much in the way of information about internal processes. Custodians of the Internet is written to be accessible to scholars, designers, engineers, executives, journalists, and policymakers from a wide variety of backgrounds, and each has something to gain from reading it. It covers the main content moderation categories, though there the spread of disinformation is only mentioned briefly. It is thorough in documenting the processes involved in content moderation at scale, and provides both a primer for readers new to the area and a wealth of details that will be new even to experienced readers. Though comprehensive, this work leaves many areas still open for exploration, particularly in the realm of user-driven moderation and users’ experiences with moderation. At their heart, content moderation discussions are conversations about our values as people and societies, and Gillespie’s work offers us an opportunity to consider what sort of future we envision for social computing and for public discourse as a whole.