6. Occupation: “Net Cleaner”—The Socio-economic Issues of Comment Moderation on French News Websites

For discussion spaces to exist online, the news media need invisible hands: these of the comment moderators. Rapidly overwhelmed by the scope of the task and the resources required to do so, the media that did not close their comment spaces often outsourced this job to specialists. In France, moderating is an oligopolistic market, where only three companies operate. Emmanuel Marty and Nikos Smyrnaios studied the one that does not offshore its business—meaning the moderators are more informed of the cultural context and current affairs, and have better working conditions. In the months following the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015, researchers collected their data in two stages. They conducted semi-structured interviews with employees of the company, and did a computer-assisted analysis of more than 29,000 published and unpublished comments sent to three media. In this way, the authors reveal four rationales that govern access to visibility: the sociopolitical context, the legal framework, the medias’ editorial and marketing strategies and the economic strategies of the moderation services.