Social media platforms and their governance policies often fail marginalized users in high-stakes contexts, including war, violent attacks, human rights violations, humanitarian crises, and situations of systemic oppression. Through interviews, autoethnography, and digital ethnography, this paper presents three case studies from Venezuela, Nigeria, and the United States to examine how marginalized populations engage with social media in non-normative ways. We analyze how platform design and policies intersect with participants’ identities, marginalization, and labor. Our central finding is that users’ urgent infrastructural and contextual needs are often overlooked, revealing structural flaws in social media design that mimic physical-world power asymmetries. In response, users develop innovative workarounds, engage in self-censorship, and adopt coping strategies, undertaking additional, often invisible, sociotechnical repair work that reinforces their precarity. To address these complex needs, we urge social media companies to collaborate with marginalized users to integrate alternative infrastructural features, such as emergency response tools and exit mechanisms for wellbeing.

When ethnic minorities in the Global South use social media to document human rights abuses against them by majority groups or state actors, platforms often remove this content, thus suppressing these groups' ability to raise awareness about their oppression. To understand ethnic minorities in the Global South's experiences with content moderation, we conducted interviews with ethnic minority Nigerian journalists, activists, politicians, and lawyers, and digital ethnographic observation of social media posts about human rights violations. We found that participants use social media as immediate and urgent archival tools to document violence and human rights abuses against them and their communities, which would not be possible with traditional media due to systemic state exclusion. Further, we identify cultural complexities and context gaps that are frequently ignored by social media companies, who impose Global North norms and values when moderating diverse populations in the Global South. When ethnic minorities post about violence and human rights concerns, they often experience over-moderation, while harmful content that targets them with violence is often under-moderated. We argue for a specialized ''social justice archive moderation'' as a way to account for the documentary and archival functions that social media serves for marginalized populations in conflict zones. We argue that this approach helps to support ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and politically vulnerable populations when moderating Global South populations in high-stakes violence and human rights contexts.

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.