Who is responsible for interventions against problematic comments? Comparing user attitudes in Germany and the United States

Abstract

Online comment sections on news organizations' social media pages provide a unique forum for exploring attitudes toward platform governance and freedom of expression at the crossroads between people, platforms, and news providers. Amid ample political and policy interest, little empirical evidence exists on user perceptions of platform governance. Through survey studies in Germany (n = 1155) and the United States (n = 1164), we provide a comparative perspective on responsibility attributions toward different regulatory actors who may intervene against problematic user comments: the state (law enforcement), platform operators (Facebook), news organizations, and users themselves. We explore this against the backdrop of different notions of free speech and cultural differences in the two countries. We find that Germans attribute greater responsibility for intervention to the state, Facebook, and news organizations than Americans. They also assume greater self-responsibility. While support for free speech did not impact responsibility attribution to Facebook, news organizations, or the users themselves, people with greater general support for free speech saw law enforcement as less responsible for intervention. The results provide empirical evidence for an integrated view of various regulatory actors who complement each other in the governance of online discussions.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Social media governance and strategies to combat online hatespeech in Germany

“…Second, our findings expand current discussions on content moderation to include the professional world. While existing research on content moderation concentrates on the state, social media companies or users as a general category (Einwiller & Kim, 2020; He, 2020; Konikoff, 2021; Riedl et al, 2021), further research is necessary regarding organizational communication, building on more general insights on sectoral differences in communication practices (see, e.g., Einwiller & Kim, 2020; Liu et al, 2010). Future research may further investigate the reasons for choosing specific counterstrategies regarding online hatespeech.…”

Support for misinformation regulation on social media: It is the perceived harm of misinformation that matters, not the perceived amount

“…The context of our study might have influenced our findings as we conducted it during the rise of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Additionally, this study was conducted in Germany, where the Network Enforcement Law was already in place for more than 2 years at the time of the study and where people are generally ascribing more responsibility for content moderation to the state and to social media platforms than, for instance, in the United States (Riedl, Naab, et al, 2021). Future research could test if the results replicate in other temporal and regulatory contexts.…”

Journalism as a profession of conditional permeability: A case study of boundaries in a participatory online news setting

“…Comment moderation at news outlets is a critical task area (Riedl et al, 2021), and as such part of a larger domain and industry of content moderation at social media platforms, which includes both commercial (Roberts, 2019) as well as volunteer moderation (Seering et al, 2020). Research has focussed on the emotionally taxing and oftentimes outsourced nature of moderation (Riedl et al, 2020).…”