University of Michigan School of Information doctoral student Sena Kojah has published her first paper as a UMSI student. The paper examines how content creators with marginalized identities experience shadowbanning. 

It also highlights the labor and economic inequalities of shadowbanning, and the resulting invisible online labor that marginalized creators often must perform. 

“‘Dialing it Back:’ Shadowbanning, Invisible Digital Labor, and how Marginalized Content Creators Attempt to Mitigate the Impacts of Opaque Platform Governance’” was published in the January issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction in collaboration with UMSI PhD student Ben Zefeng Zhang, Carolina Are, Daniel Delmonaco and UMSI assistant professor Oliver Haimson.

The publication of a PhD student’s first paper is a big milestone in their career, initiating them into the scholarly community as producers of knowledge. UMSI supports their work as part of our mission to share knowledge.  

Kojah is a 3rd year PhD student at UMSI. Before joining UMSI, she completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees in mass communication from the University of Jos in Nigeria. As a journalist, Kojah reported investigative stories and also researched the use of cost-effective messaging apps to create a model of news distribution for newsrooms that bypasses government media censorship in Nigeria as a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.

It was during her time as a fellow and following the ban of X (formerly Twitter) in Nigeria in 2021 that Kojah became interested in how marginalized people navigate online spaces. 

“I naturally started thinking about how marginalized populations, like ethnic minorities, women and people who are LGBTQIA+ are experiencing social media,” she says. “Especially when they use it to document human rights abuses and violence against them. I decided to apply to UMSI to research these issues.”

Kojah’s thesis advisors are UMSI assistant professor Oliver Haimson and UMSI professor Kentaro Toyama. She is expected to graduate in 2027. In the meantime, Kojah’s research will explore content moderation, digital surveillance and repression, authoritarianism, generative AI, social media, human rights and marginality in the Global South. 

She is currently working on another paper on content moderation and the experiences of ethnic minorities in Nigeria during high-stakes contexts like violent crises and human rights violations.

At UMSI, Kojah loves the “diversity of thought and research interests.” 

Read “‘Dialing it Back:’ Shadowbanning, Invisible Digital Labor, and how Marginalized Content Creators Attempt to Mitigate the Impacts of Opaque Platform Governance’” in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. The paper is authored by Sena Kojah, Ben Zefeng Zhang, Carolina Are, Daniel Delmonaco and Oliver Haimson. See the abstract below: 

Content creators with marginalized identities are disproportionately affected by shadowbanning on social media platforms, which impacts their economic prospects online. Through a diary study and interviews with eight marginalized content creators who are women, pole dancers, plus size, and/or LGBTQIA+, this paper examines how content creators with marginalized identities experience shadowbanning. We highlight the labor and economic inequalities of shadowbanning, and the resulting invisible online labor that marginalized creators often must perform. We identify three types of invisible labor that marginalized content creators engage in to mitigate shadowbanning and sustain their online presence: mental and emotional labor, misdirected labor, and community labor. We conclude that even though marginalized content creators engaged in cross-platform collaborative labor and personal mental/emotional labor to mitigate the impacts of shadowbanning, it was insufficient to prevent uncertainty and economic precarity created by algorithmic opacity and ambiguity.

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Learn more about Sena Kojah’s research by visiting her UMSI profile. 

Apply to UMSI’s PhD in Information.