Reconsidering Self-Moderation

Abstract

Research in online content moderation has a long history of exploring different forms that moderation can take, including both user-driven moderation models on community-based platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook Groups, and Reddit, and centralized corporate moderation models on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. In this work I review different approaches to moderation research with the goal of providing a roadmap for researchers studying community self-moderation. I contrast community-based moderation research with platforms and policies-focused moderation research, and argue that the former has an important role to play in shaping discussions about the future of online moderation. I provide six guiding questions for future research that, if answered, can support the development of a form of user-driven moderation that is widely implementable across a variety of social spaces online, offering an alternative to the corporate moderation models that dominate public debate and discussion. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts, and models.

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

“…Online content moderation is one of the central processes through which public discourse is negotiated among different actors including users, social media platforms, and governmental regulators. In many content moderation systems, the most common and feasible way for ordinary internet users to moderate content is online reporting (Buni and Chemaly, 2016;Seering, 2020).…”

Reporting the Community Beat: Practices for Moderating Online Discussion at a News Website

“…For example, the simple task of determining whether a contribution should be rejected could be performed by a human reviewing each contribution manually or by a system applying a predefined list of prohibited terms automatically. Recent advancements have helped to broaden the scope of content moderation from a platform-centered and regulatory perspective [40] to a perspective that centers on community-driven decision-making [69] within an increasingly complex political landscape [37,38].…”

“…A community might organize moderators into various configurations (e.g., ad hoc juries [26], teams [22,70]). Additionally, moderators are situated within the social organization of their community [69] and platform [34,68].…”

“…In practice, moderating an online community may involve large teams of people working in conjunction with automated systems to keep up with the ebb and flow of user-generated content [33]. Research about content moderation has continued to develop from notions of how to organize content (e.g., deleting, filtering, recommending, synthesizing) [40], to strategies about how to advance broad social and content norms that address insularity [2], offer care [21,57,87], champion free speech [48], and encourage governance structures that are community-centered [69]. Content moderation is meant to promote productivity and openness within an online community [18,40], but in the context of a news website, moderators may also need to pay careful attention to how contributions affect the reporting [3,12,74] and reporters' credibility [20,80].…”

Criminogenic and harm-enabling features of social media platforms: The case of sharenting practices

“…As such, they are a first point of intervention for preventing and countering several criminal, deviant, or otherwise harmful activities online, in the effort to create, nurture or maintain a better social media platform ecosystem. Following Seering's (2020) distinction among ‘the platforms and policies perspective’ and ‘the communities perspective’ in moderation research, acknowledging that previous research has already stressed how platforms generally allow users significant leeway to self-moderate (for a review, see Seering, 2020), and fully recognising the importance of intra-group moderation, this study departs by looking at platforms and policies as – we claim – these provide the overarching frame within which also users’ intra-group moderation occurs.…”