Visibility regimes and the infrastructures of citizenship: content moderation as digital governance

Drawing on the concept ‘visibility regime’, this paper argues that visibility has become a central lens through which acts of citizenship play out in the moderation of online hate in Germany. Mobilising ethnographic fieldwork, it posits three frames of visibility guiding the work of content moderators: a protective frame, in which they absorb the harms of hate to shield others from them; a normative frame, highlighting the policies and practices guiding categorisation and removal; and a political frame, responding to the exploitation and neglect of their working conditions. Moderators are correspondingly grasped as care providers, mediators of discourse and political subjects. It proposes that these emergent forms of subjectivity and their respective modes of claim-making – i.e. the labour of maintaining the infrastructures of digital citizenship – be described collectively as a type of infrastructural citizenship, which defines state-subject relations through the subjects’ roles in producing (digital) citizenship infrastructures for society.