Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media

Tarleton Gillespie — a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and one of the field's leading scholars of platform governance — examines the hidden decisions through which social media companies shape the information environment: what content is allowed, what is removed, what is amplified, and who decides. His central argument is that platforms are not neutral conduits for user expression but active custodians of public discourse, whose content moderation decisions have enormous political and social consequences, and that the opacity surrounding these decisions is itself a form of power.

Custodians of the Internet is essential for practitioners because it provides the most rigorous available account of how platform content moderation actually works — and why it is so difficult to do well at scale. The tension Gillespie identifies between platforms' commercial incentives, their public interest obligations, their legal constraints, and their user expectations is the same tension that makes coordinated inauthentic behaviour and disinformation so difficult to address through platform action alone. For organisations advising clients on platform governance, content policy, or the limits of technical counter-disinformation approaches, this is required reading.