Coordinated Flagging

Author: Cynthia Khoo

See ‘flagging’.

‘Coordinated flagging’ refers to a form of the large-scale organized campaign where a group of individuals decides to simultaneously flag the social media content of a specific individual or specific group of individuals, marking such content as offensive, with the purpose of having the impacted individual(s) banned or suspended from the platform, or their content is taken down. This is commonly understood to be a form of technology-facilitated abuse and harassment, where often the content is not offensive, and in fact, may be content that itself calls attention to the abuse that the author is experiencing, and then is further targeted for speaking out about. Coordinated flagging is one of several ways in which online abusers game or exploit content moderation features on platforms to target their victims, often members of historically marginalized or vulnerable communities, as a form of silencing with the intent or effect of driving such users away from online spaces. For example, “[i]n 2012, accusations swirled around a conservative group called ‘Truth4Time’, believed to be coordinating its prominent membership to flag pro-gay groups on Facebook” (Crawford; Gillespie, 2016)¹.

Such campaigns may also include an ostensible broader political purpose that goes beyond engaging in discriminatory online abuse for its own sake. For instance, Brittany Fiore-Silfvast has described coordinated flagging as a type of ‘user-generated warfare’ (Fiore-Silfvast, 2012)² and gives the following example of a coordinated flagging campaign known as “Operation YouTube Smackdown” (OYS), with the slogan, “Countering the Cyber-Jihad one video at a time”. Here, the coordinated attacks are explicitly framed by the perpetrators as part of a broader political objective (in contrast to other instances of discriminatory online abuse and harassment, which also advance broader political objectives but are not always acknowledged to have this effect). According to Fiore-Silfvast (2012, pp. 1972-73)³:

OYS began out of a conversation among conservative bloggers who were inspired by the potential for private citizens to fight the war through the Internet. […] The blogger called on his blogger friends to join the effort by volunteering to scour YouTube for footage from the “enemy” and flag it for YouTube’s corporate staff to review and remove. After one of the bloggers volunteered his blog to serve as the coordinating site of operations, a handful of other bloggers began to connect their blogs and direct their readership to OYS. It was there and then that the conservative bloggers and their readership began organizing themselves into a network army that would fight Internet terrorists on YouTube.

Coordinated flagging is also known as ‘strategic flagging’ or ‘organized flagging’ and results in user flags playing a governing role (Crawford; Gillespie, 2016)⁴,

not expressing individual and spontaneous concern but as a social and coordinated proclamation of collective, political indignation—all through the tiny fulcrum that is the flag, which is asked to carry even more semantic weight.

References

1. Crawford, K., Gillespie, T. (2016). What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint. New Media & Society. 18(3), 410-428.
2. Fiore-Silfvast, B. (2012). User-generated warfare: A case of converging wartime information networks and co-productive regulation on YouTube. International Journal of Communication, 6, 24.
3. Fiore-Silfvast, B. (2012). User-generated warfare: A case of converging wartime information networks and coproductive regulation on YouTube. International Journal of Communication, 6, 24.
4. Crawford, K., Gillespie, T. (2016). What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint. New Media & Society. 18(3), 410-428.