“Jol” or “Pani”: How Does Governance Shape a Platform’s Identity?
This post summarizes our CSCW 2021 paper titled “ “Jol” or “Pani”: How Does Governance Shape a Platform’s Identity?”. You can read a pre-print of the paper from here. We are pleased to receive an honorable mention for best paper award and a recognition for diversity and inclusion for this work.
We live in a world that has been shaped by colonialism. Historically, colonialism means the policies and practices through which foreign forces migrate to other regions and impose their values and perspectives on the social structures of the local and indigenous communities — often enforced through military forces, settler strategies which involved enslavement, rape, genocide, and erasure of the culture of black, indigenous, and other people of color.
The Indian subcontinent is a site of prolonged colonization. The Bengali ethnolinguistic group native to Bangladesh and India were also subject to this colonization. In fact, British colonization in the subcontinent started from the Bengal region and was used as a site of partition following the end of British rule. Hindu majority West Bengal was annexed to India and Muslim majority East Bengal became a part of Pakistan initially which later got independence as modern-day Bangladesh. Noticeable differences in the dialects and social practices can be found among the Bengalis from different regions.
Let me share a particular case of moderation decision on Bengali Quora (BnQuora). A user asked a question, “Where can I find pure drinking water?”. Now, the word water has two different translations in Bengali: Jol (জল) and Pani (পানি). While Jol is used mostly by the Bengali Hindus and the people in India, its synonym Pani is more widely used by the Bangladesh Bengalis and the Muslim Bengalis. Though these two words mean the same thing, the moderators on Quora edited the question to replace the word Pani with the word Jol. Many users viewed this kind of editing as the moderators’ preference towards the Indian Hindu Bengali linguistic practices over others.
The same kind of privileging happened often with people’s national and religious identities. Unlike many other community spaces, the moderation on Quora is anonymous. Moreover, the users have described that the “Be Nice, Be Respectful” or BNBR policy of Quora is subject to individual moderators’ and users’ interpretation. That means the users do not know who the moderators are and there is a lack of clarity about what the moderators are looking at their posts to decide whether the posts will be retained or deleted from the platform. Thus, the users undergo a panoptic experience on the platform, in that people know they are being policed and collectively try to understand their myriad experiences with the platform’s governance.
Besides moderators, the users have also talked about on this forum how the majority community uses technical features like upvotes, downvotes, and reports to surveil and ridicule the minority’s interaction on the platform based on their names, or dialects when they post anonymously. Through these technical features, people reflect their personal prejudice and biases and when done in large number, such quantification influence moderation decision, and erase the minority voice.
On top of that, the recommendation algorithm on Quora does not help much in this regard. When a new user joins the platform, it promotes controversial threads which are often about religion, caste, and nationalities. Much like how the colonial rulers crudely generalized the diverse subcontinental population, the algorithm shifts the focus of this community from their unity to a more communal divisive way of looking.
“No matter how successful and enterprising you are in your own [professional] field — you have only one identity in Bengali Quora — Hindu or Muslim.”
As the minority users face these hurdles, Quora launched a feature called মঞ্চ or stages which are somewhat like Facebook groups. Here, like-minded people can come together. These are less visible spaces within the platform and less likely to be surveilled by the majority. The minority users confine themselves within those.
Through this, majority identities are normalized and become more visible, while the minority identity becomes marginalized and less visible. The linguistic identity initially brought together a range of discourse practices, temporal horizons, national, and religious identities. Slowly it starts to purge minority performances or pushes them to the margins and reinforce the colonial divide. As our larger goal of the research is to understand how we can design to promote interactions around people with colonialized histories; in this paper, we studied what impedes these kinds of conversations.
Dipto Das, Carsten Østerlund, and Bryan Semaan. 2021. “Jol” or “Pani”?: How Does Governance Shape a Platform’s Identity?. Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW2, Article 473 (October 2021), 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479860
