In the Shadows of Instagram: How Marginalized Groups Resist Stigmatization on Social Media Platforms

Abstract

In our research, we focus on moral stigma as an additional and structural diversity dimension that unproportionally intersects with precarious working conditions of those being affected. Marginalized groups facing soft or hard moral stigmatization regarding their occupations, such as pole dancers, sex workers, or strippers, flee into digital spaces to build their business ties, organize learning, and make livelihoods. However, obscure content moderation practices in the digital hinder communication within and among marginalized groups facing moral stigmatization and thus, enforce the precarity. Consequently, marginalized groups either leave or organize resistance. We focus on strategies of the pole dance community as a marginalized group to resist moral stigmatization encoded in the content moderation practices of Instagram. Applying a ‘communication constitutes organization (CCO)-perspective’, we see content moderation and the encoded moral stigma as co-constitutive for organization and therefore, for organizing resistance. We conducted a netnography and analyzed 288 communicative acts uttered by the pole dance community and other marginalized groups. We identified three strategies of resistance that evolve from individual to collective resistance and from emphasizing differences and, thereby, stigmatizing to emphasizing similarities among pole dancers and other marginalized groups. The findings show how the moral stigmatization in the digital is contestable through content moderation and how it constitutes collective resistance re-establishing and finally fighting it.