Decolonizing Tactics as Collective Resilience: Identity Work of AAPI Communities on Reddit

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities are using online platforms like Reddit to build capacity for resilience from white hegemony. We conducted interviews with 21 moderators of AAPI subreddits to understand how sociotechnical systems contour and contribute to the marginalization of online communities. We examine marginalization through the analytic framework of decolonization and uncover the threats and tactics that AAPI redditors encounter and employ to decolonize their collective identity. We find that moderators of AAPI subreddits develop collective resilience within their online communities by reclaiming space to confront brigade invasion, recording collective memory to circumvent systemic erasure, and revising cultural narratives to deconstruct colonial mentality. We discuss how algorithmic configurations within sociotechnical systems reaffirm existing hegemonic values, and we describe how users and designers of sociotechnical systems can work toward resistance.