Content Moderation as Practice and Object of Digital Hermeneutics: An Infrastructural Analysis of the Auschwitz Museum on Twitter
摘要
Since Elon Musk’s takeover and even more so since the Hamas attack on Israel, Twitter has become a platform for anti-Semitic and right-wing content, also affecting institutions such as the Auschwitz Museum in its communication. Only in May 2024 the museum declared on its channel that several anti-Semitic posts were not removed as there were allegedly “no violations of the X rules in the content”. This example is just one of many that elucidates the opaque practices of content moderation on social media. Within the course of these practices, it is up to private and profit-oriented social media companies to not only select and arrange content but also to decide on its meaning and ultimately make it (un)available or (in)visible. Based on empirical data from an ethnographic research project, the paper focuses on content moderation and its meaning-making processes on Twitter in the context of museums. It not only seeks to contribute to a differentiated understanding of content moderation within the context of digital hermeneutics but also to link content moderation to the theoretical concept of infrastructure by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan L. Star. Building upon this theoretical framework, the paper addresses the question of how content moderation on Twitter infrastructures the communication of the Auschwitz Museum and vice versa. The empirical results show that the museum’s communication is strongly influenced by right-wing, anti-Semitic processes of meaning-making and that research on content moderation poses methodological challenges for research in the field of digital hermeneutics.