Reshaping platform governmentality: the curious case of the moderation strike on the stack exchange

This research explores the power dynamics between platform owners and online communities, focusing on the Stack Exchange moderation strike against the company’s new policy on AI-generated content. Using Foucault’s concept of governmentality, we show how the moderation of AI-generated content revealed tensions and resulted in collective action that made platform governmentality visible. In their strike, moderators resisted the policy by repurposing platform features, mobilizing users, and negotiating for greater autonomy. Our analysis indicates that platform governmentality is a combination of the disciplinary and security regimes and that the same mechanisms that support them can also be appropriated for resistance. We show how the strike and subsequent negotiations reshaped the platform’s disciplinary and security mechanisms, essentially by reasserting the role of disciplinary mechanisms through new confidential heuristics and revised procedures that also resulted in changing the platform technology. This study also highlights the complex role and power position of volunteer moderators in the organizing processes of platform capitalism.