Authority Over the Alternative: The Role of Social Media, Content Moderation and Secularism in Authorizing the Rise and Fall of Alternative Spiritualities

Abstract:

Abstract: Through an examination of social media content moderation frameworks applied to moderate the activities and reported abuses and harms of alternative spiritualities, this paper discusses the challenges, power dynamics, and authority placed over the activities of alternative spiritualities online. Centered on the moral inheritances of secularism and how it operates within content moderation decisions in ways that can subjugate faith practices outside of dominant secular and Christian understandings of spirituality, this paper examines the ways social media technologies by design replicate vs. transcend social inequities and religious/spiritual hierarchies.

This paper offers opportunities to highlight the powerful role religious literacy and scholarship can play in the future of tech governance in order to peacefully address the reproduction of structural forms of inequity that have been inherited and masked through governing assumptions about faith and religion."

Presenter bio: Jenn Louie is a former Head of Business Integrity Operations at Facebook. She previously served as the first Head of Trust & Safety at Meetup and established her career in policy and Trust and Safety at Google. Jenn has spoken on online risk and tech policies at SXSW, IDEO, Techweek NYC, and the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium. She is an innovator, entrepreneur and graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, where she is learning about moral formation and religious literacy in order to inform her development of The Moral Innovation Lab. Jenn aspires to dismantle social inequities that are recreated through masked moral inheritances transferred to tech governance and design. She is the founder of the Spiritual Care Project and an industry expert in Integrity and Trust & Safety Operations and Tech Policy.

Affiliation: Harvard Divinity School