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In a recent piece I called this “stacked moderation”. Platforms or other intermediaries “below” platforms that can demand standards of moderation. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/parler-apple-google.html
"Moderation at an infrastructural level is not only harder to see or hold accountable, it can create stacks, where one intermediary must abide by the rules of another, meaning users are regulated by both together, in ways difficult to discern." https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/expanding-debate-about-content-moderation-scholarly-research-agendas-coming-policy
App stores are the most obvious example, but it can also be done, is also done, by cloud computing providers, payment networks, and other infrastructural network services.
It might sound nefarious, and it can be problematic when it's invisible. But it's not wrong. And it’s pretty common in other industries, even progressive -- think about sellers imposing labor standards on manufacturers, manufacturers imposing labor standards on suppliers.
The alternative, have services like app stores have to hold their nose and accept everything? We could do that, I suppose, make all infrastructural providers services 100% agnostic, but that would tie their hands in a lot ways they expect to have freedom as market actors.
But what's infrastructure to what? An app store may be infrastructure to a social media platform, cloud computing infrastructure to the app store, the social media platform infrastructure to a game. There is no natural line below which everything should obviously be neutral.
Stacked moderation allows some room for compromise; Parler might find a content moderation standard that Apple can accept, that is still more lenient than Twitter. But, what’s likely here, it tends to draw the more radical services closer into alignment - or kill them off.
Which is in fact a good thing, or can be. It’s called society. As we can see here.
An excellent essay on these dynamics is "Defunding Hate: PayPal’s Regulation of Hate Groups" by @NTusikov https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/12908
And wow, if this is accurate, another deep, deep example of infrastructural moderation: https://twitter.com/DaveLeeFT/status/1347724201331814401
Moderation of Trump heads still further down the stack. I suspect cloud computing is the next big battleground, especially around hatred and domestic terrorism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/09/amazon-parler-suspension/
I’m worried about corporate power too. But it’s hard not to see these steps as platforms acting (reluctantly, awkwardly, hypocritically, to be sure) in a complete political vacuum, absent of sensible debate and legislation about public speech and intermediary responsibilities.
