Going Dark

This paper describes how people who lead communities on online platforms join together in mass collective action to influence platform operators. I investigate this by analyzing a protest against the social news platform reddit by moderators of 2,278 subreddit communities in July 2015. These moderators collectively disabled their subreddits, preventing millions of readers from accessing major parts of reddit and convincing the company to negotiate over their demands. This paper offers a descriptive analysis of the protest, combining qualitative content analysis, interviews, and quantitative analysis with the population of 52,735 active subreddits. Through participatory hypotheses testing with moderators, this study reveals social factors including the grievances of moderators, relations with platform operators, relations among moderators, subreddit resources, subreddit isolation, and moderators' relations with their subreddits that can lead to participation in mass collective action against a platform.