Algorithmic Sacredness and Algorithmic Pluralism: Content Moderation and the Symbolic Dispossession of Contemporary European Paganism

This paper examines mainstream platform moderation as it encounters contemporary pagan religious practice in Europe and reads what it finds as a symptom of a wider condition: the algorithm functions less as a neutral tool than as a productive instrument of an extractive political economy whose characteristic operation is the appropriation, classification, and revenue-conditioned filtering of human expression. Minority religious traditions are structurally exposed within it: too small to constitute an accommodated market, too polysemic for classifiers trained on majority devotional and Anglo-American extremism corpora, and too fragmented to extract policy concessions. Empirically, the paper draws on netnography of pagan online communities across Europe, informal conversations with 97 practitioners across nine European jurisdictions, and a corpus of 247 takedown notices and appeal exchanges (2019–2025). Three recurrent rationale-clusters—devotional content classified as occult, as extremism-adjacent, and as unsafe activity—are read as predictable outputs of the system’s cost structure rather than as ordinary classifier errors. Two concepts are proposed. Algorithmic sacredness names the transfer of gate-keeping functions previously held by ecclesiastical, state, and editorial actors, routed through Bourdieu’s meta-capital as extended to platforms. Algorithmic pluralism names a programmatic direction toward infrastructures whose governance is not capital’s.