Let's report our rivals: how Chinese fandoms game content moderation to restrain opposing voices

Abstract

While crowdsourcing approaches in content moderation systems increase the governance capacity of social media, they also offer a loophole for malicious users to massively report and restrict disliked content.To fill the knowledge gap about large-scale, bottom-up attempts at restraining online expressions, we focus on a type of public and institutionalized mass reporting: anti-smear (反黑) campaigns within Chinese online fandom communities, where fans coordinate together and collectively report content they perceive as inappropriate.Based on detailed data of more than two hundred anti-smear groups collected from Weibo and interviews with active participants, our paper examines the motives and dynamics of anti-smear campaigns, the coordination strategies used to game the content moderation system, and the diffusion of anti-smear culture among fandom networks. We argue that anti-smear is essentially a practice of information control and reflects an intolerant mindset of social media users towards dissidents.This paper also points out the vulnerability of community-based content moderation systems to be weaponized in a polarized age, which brings great challenges to platform governance.

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

“…We manually examined the nodes in a few biggest clusters. We found that many users are fans of singers who reported undesired content in a coordinated way as Zhao and Chen [26] described (but on a much smaller scale). Besides, we also noticed many vigilante users in big co-reporting clusters who frequently reported inappropriate posts.…”

“…Giving ordinary people the right to report undesired content on social media may lead to a concern that users may weaponize this power to retrain the free expressions of others or stir up conflicts [6,11], especially in the authoritarian context [14]. Meanwhile, the tendency to report others is contagious and would intensify the online polarized atmosphere, and large-scale coordinated reportings could burden the content moderation system [26]. It is important to understand how social media react to such challenges.…”

“…Previous studies show some suspicious coordinated behaviors in social media reporting [26], so we want to examine if Weibo users have similar patterns of coordinated reporting behaviors. We defined co-reporting relations between two users as making reports to the same target at least three times.…”

“…We noticed that reporting and being reported are associated with the opponent's actions from other users, even a third party. This result calls for a new design on social media to facilitate better reports, or else a report button may further deteriorate the already radical and uncivil atmosphere in cyberspace [26].…”