Mapping the Stochastic Penal Colony

With peak content moderation seemingly behind us, this paper revisits its punitive side. But instead of focusing on who is being (disproportionately) moderated, it focuses on the punishment itself and makes three contributions. First, it develops a novel methodology that combines auto-ethnography for collecting experiences and artifacts with procedural justice for analyzing them. Second, it reworks Foucault's model of the penal system for the algorithmic age, restoring the penal colony as the historically liminal practice between punishment as performance and punishment as discipline, i.e., the stochastic penal colony. Finally, it applies this methodological and conceptual framing to three case studies, one on the gallingly performative moderation by pre-Musk Twitter, one on the exhaustively punitive content moderation for OpenAI's DALLE~2, and one on the relatively light touch but still rather precious moderation by Pinterest. While substantially different, all three feature the pervasive threat of account suspension, thereby banishing users to the stochastic penal colony.