Moderator engagement and community development in the age of algorithms

By Joseph Seering, Tonya Wang, Jina Yoon, Geoff F. Kaufman. New Media & Society, 2019

331 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Online communities provide a forum for rich social interaction and identity development for billions of Internet users worldwide. In order to manage these communities, platform owners have increasingly turned to commercial content moderation, which includes both the use of moderation algorithms and the employment of professional moderators, rather than user-driven moderation, to detect and respond to anti-normative behaviors such as harassment and spread of offensive content. We present findings from semi-structured interviews with 56 volunteer moderators of online communities across three platforms (Twitch, Reddit, and Facebook), from which we derived a generalized model categorizing the ways moderators engage with their communities and explaining how these communities develop as a result. This model contains three processes: being and becoming a moderator; moderation tasks, actions, and responses; and rules and community development. In this work, we describe how moderators contribute to the development of meaningful communities, both with and without algorithmic support.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/32f664c5b55a0fece785ed0b717968b7629120fe

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Citations in the corpus

Human-Machine Collaboration for Content Regulation: The Case of Reddit Automoderator (2019, background): “Some prior research has explored the work of moderators [5, 29, 31, 69, 97, 111].”
Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political challenges in the automation of platform governance (2020, background): “The GIFCT maintains the SIHD of terrorist content, which is now used by 13 different companies, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Oath, Reddit and Snap.”
The Pushshift Reddit Dataset (2020, result): “This distributed and volunteerled model stands in contrast to the centralized strategies of other prominent social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Seering et al. 2019).”
Evolving Role of Social Media in Health Promotion: Updated Responsibilities for Health Education Specialists (2020, background): “Analytics also help to extract useful patterns of user activity to measure the engagement, experience, and moderator responsiveness within online communities [23].”