Lee Gensler

LEE GENSLER, then a graduate student at the City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, New York, was awarded funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Leftbook and Contested Visions of the Good: Social Media Platform Governance, Political Subjectivity, and New Moral Traditions,” supervised by Dr. Ida Susser. In 2010, Facebook introduced ‘Groups’ to allow users to organize around shared interests. Currently, over 1.8 billion people use Facebook groups. Groups operate within Facebook’s larger structure of platform governance, primarily enforced through algorithmic content moderation. But each group is also created and governed by a team of Facebook users, who write and enforce rules, accept or reject members, and build and maintain the values of each space. This project examines social formation in Facebook groups, social media platform governance, and the interplay of user-led group moderation and algorithmic content moderation. In doing so, this project brings an ethnographic approach to understanding an oft-overlooked scale of platform governance. By bringing an anthropological lens to user-led Facebook group governance, it seeks to challenge existing frameworks for understanding social media platform governance that fail to examine how governance functions across scales. With a focus on left-leaning groups, this dissertation explores the processes of rule-making and enforcement within Facebook groups to address larger questions about how social media platforms shape and are shaped by the moral orders operating within them and examines the political subjectivities of those who are empowered and disempowered within those systems.