Governing social media with users: tracing the evolution in Weibo community policies

Abstract

Launched in 2009 and later becoming the most popular microblogging service in China, Weibo once had a bold experiment to address the unprecedented challenge of large-scale inappropriate content on its platform. It imitated the common law and jury institution and established a community committee system to involve ordinary users in the content moderation process. However, this innovation with democratic components later got reversed and transformed into a more platform-centric design where users only played an assistive role. This paper traces all available policy documents and web archives to map out how Weibo’s community governance evolved from a half-autonomous system to a rigidly controlled model since 2012. This paper suggests that a democratic content moderation system cannot last under external pressures on the social media company and without the solid empowerment of users.

Rule social media with users: Unveiling Strategical Governance and User Dynamics in Weibo's Community-driven Content Moderation System

“…We also noticed that cases like troll and harassment usually receive penalties much lighter than misinformation, 1 point or 2 points most of the time. While we cannot validate whether such a penalty was consistent with Weibo's regulation at that time, web archives of Weibo documents suggest that user conflicts usually receive lighter penalties than cases with public interests [25]. Account suspension data tells a similar story about misinformation being a big concern for Weibo authority.…”

“…Weibo's convention and related policies were amended a few times after their initial publication [25]. With the help of search engines and Internet Archives, we collected multiple versions of different policy documents about the Weibo community-driven content moderation system.…”

“…In the beginning, Weibo stated that it needed around five thousand to ten thousand regular committee members and around one thousand to fifteen hundred expert committee members. Weibo successfully recruited 5,000 members for its regular committee, and 484 members for its expert committee in the first application around [25]. In later years, Weibo recruited more members to meet the growing demand for content moderation.…”

“…These content categories include trolling, plagiarism, harassment, misinformation, impersonation, spam ads, personal privacy leakage, and others. The accurate meanings of these categories are defined in Weibo's policies [25].…”