A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

The owners of information: Content curation practices of middle-level gatekeepers in political Facebook groups




AuthorsMalinen Sanna

PublisherSage Publications

Publication year2024

JournalNew Media and Society

Journal acronymNMS

Volume26

Issue1

First page 495

Last page512

eISSN1461-7315

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211062123

Web address https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448211062123

Self-archived copy’s web addresshttps://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/68047025


Abstract

Volunteer moderators play a key role when making judgements about which online content should be accepted and which should be removed. As such, their work fundamentally shapes the digital social and political spheres. Using the data obtained from 15 Facebook group moderator interviews as research data, this study focused on the content curation work by the middle-level gatekeepers of Finnish political discussion groups on Facebook. The findings show that the moderators feel strong ownership of the groups they moderate and of the information such groups provide, and as a result, they strongly shape the groups’ discussion and governing policy. Facebook’s governing policy for groups is vague, which gives space for group norms and identities to develop. The stakeholder groups (i.e. the platform administration, moderators and users) do not attend to the governance process all together, so negotiations among them are almost non-existent.


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Last updated on 2025-14-02 at 16:07