"It's Just the Job": Investigating the Influence of Culture in India's Commercial Content Moderation Industry
Sabrina Ahmad · 2019
As user-generated content (UGC) on social media becomes near-ubiquitous, the need to review potentially insidious text, images, and video before and after they surface has resulted in the emergence of a new industry in global digital labour: commercial content moderation (CCM). A psychologically taxing job, a handful of scholars and journalists have studied the emotional burden for content moderators in the West, many of whom are predominantly based in Silicon Valley. However, much of this work is increasingly outsourced to the Global South, namely in India and the Philippines. Despite the fact that these overseas moderators filter UGC from Western countries, where the cultural norms on topics like hate speech and sexuality differ from those in Eastern countries like India, the academic research to date has neglected to study foreign content moderators and the ways in which their culture may impact their decision-making processes in reviewing UGC. This thesis takes a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews to study content moderators in India with the objective of understanding not only the country’s booming and rapidly-evolving content moderation industry, but more essentially the subjectivities of Indian moderators and how their culture might influence their work. In addition to presenting novel findings in the general field of CCM, this research ultimately demonstrates that many of the assumptions about Indian content moderators – primarily that they are unable to separate their own cultural upbringings from the US-centric policy guidelines they are meant to uphold – are erroneous and in need of revisiting.