I’ve found the recent trend of people post Tweet threads recapping the major arguments of their books helpful and productive, so I wanted to do one for my new book The Digital Closet (digitalcloset.org) from @mitpbookstore. #queerbooks #LGBT #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #censorship 1/17
My book explores how heteronormative bias is deeply embedded in the internet, hidden algorithms, keywords, content moderation, and more. Below you’ll find summaries of each chapter in the book to give you a preview. 2/17
The actual book will fill in these summaries with hundreds of documented examples which in aggregate demonstrate a systemic anti-LGBTQIA+ bias online. 3/17
The introduction works to debunk the myth that the internet is a pornotopia, full of every type of pornography imaginable all reachable with the click of a mouse. It shows how this narrative serves the ideological purpose of obscuring the ongoing war on pornography. 4/17
The intro also examines feminist and queer theory to derive a definition of heteronormativity, which was one of the most surprising difficult concepts to pin down with any clarity, and closes by situating the book within this broader history of feminist and queer theory. 5/17
CH1 explores the history of political activism focused on censoring pornography online. It shows how evangelical conservatives, anti-porn feminists, and the alt-right have become unlikely bedfellows in the war on pornography. 6/17
It shows the cis- and heteronormativity at the heart of the alt-right's anti-pornography arguments, which CH2 will show has seeped into the discourse of the largely male, frequently libertarian-leaning coders responsible for producing the algorithms that police the internet. 7/17
CH2 looks at the coders, code, and moderators that make web-scale censorship possible and demonstrates how each level of the apparatus, from coders to code to moderators, works to reify heteronormativity. 8/17
CH2 examines James Damore’s infamous Google memo and shows its normalization amongst Silicon Valley coders. It examines the computer vision algorithms that power content moderation, with a specific focus on Google’s SafeSearch algorithms and the datasets it was trained on. 9/17
Lastly, CH2 examines the work of offshore content moderators who are given heteronormative guidebooks, taught to deprioritize assessments of obscenity in favor of political speech, and given mere seconds to make decisions about whether content constitutes pornography. 10/17
CH3 examines the collateral damage in the war on porn. It catalogs the censorship of LGBTQIA+ community resources, sex education materials, art, literature, and other content that flirts with the sexual or erotic but wouldn't be called pornography by everyday audiences. 11/17
CH3 also examines how the passage of FOSTA-SESTA by the US Congress in 2017 rewrote the rules of online content moderation and amplified the censorship of sex online. 12/17
CH4 examines the political economy of pornography online and finds two primary ways that porn is rendered increasingly heteronormative online: (1) web traffic is bottlenecked by pornographic keywords that allow mainstream heteroporn companies to dominate search results, 13/17
and (2) tube sites (e.g. Pornhub, xHamster) reinforce heteronormativity through their data structures which shape what porn gets made, uploaded, and becomes discoverable by users. The end result is that porn ends up being endlessly repetitive and boring. 14/17
The conclusion outlines some means by which people might try to counteract the digital closet, though of course these are provisional and require the input and revisions of people with different perspectives and skillsets. 15/17
They range from revisionist approaches like demanding anti-censorship commitments from social media companies, building resources for cataloguing censorship and holding companies accountable, and restructuring how internet companies are regulated, 16/17
to the more revolutionary, like turning social media into public utilities, defunding the police, and reaching for a queer utopia best exemplified by the meme of fully automated luxury gay space communism. 17/17
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
