How do the main social media platforms (based primarily in two countries - the USA and China) contend with the wide cultural and linguistic variation of their global users as they endeavor to create and enforce universal standards? How can we situate this new attempt at the universalization of norms in the context of past and ongoing universalist exercises such as, for example, International Human Rights. In this presentation, Baron will address these questions through an examination of content moderation policies and the controversies that surround them.

Biography

Baron Pineda is a cultural anthropologist specializing in human rights, indigenous peoples, and Latin America. He is the author of Shipwrecked Identities: Navigating Race on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast (Rutgers University Press), as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals. He has a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric and anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree and PhD from the University of Chicago. Since 2002, he has been conducting field research on global indigenous politics at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

He is currently a professor and former chair of anthropology at Oberlin College.