Decolonizing Content Moderation: Does Uniform Global Community Standard Resemble Utopian Equality or Western Power Hegemony?

By Farhana Shahid, Aditya Vashistha. 2023

75 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social media platforms use content moderation to reduce and remove problematic content. However, much of the discourse on the benefits and pitfalls of moderation has so far focused on users in the West. Little is known about how users in the Global South interact with the humans and algorithms behind opaque moderation systems. To fill this gap, we conducted interviews with 19 Bangladeshi social media users who received restrictions for violating community standards on Facebook. We found that the users perceived the underlying human-AI infrastructure to imbibe coloniality in the form of amplifying power relations, centering Western norms, and perpetuating historical injustices and erasure of minoritized expressions. Based on the findings, we establish that the current moderation systems often propagate historical power relations and patterns of oppression, and discuss ways to rethink moderation in a fundamentally decolonial way.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Natural Language Processing, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Communication

In Sociology and Political Science

In Natural Language Processing

In Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

Citations in the corpus

Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society (2023, background): “Lessons from social media content moderation can apply, such as working with groups who have been erased and documenting patterns of erasure to improve future approaches [213].”