Abstract: Across the web, users post hundreds of billions of pieces of content daily, and decisions about how to moderate this content will shape the future of public speech. While the academic discourse around content moderation frequently focuses on centralized models through technical or legalistic lenses, moderation is a process that is inherently social. The factors that drive users’ collective creation and enforcement of rules and norms are responsible for determining what content eventually appears on the platforms that we all use, but these factors remain understudied in the context of content moderation. In this talk, Seering will describe qualitative and quantitative research that gives shape to the social dynamics underlying content moderation, and he argues that these social dynamics offer opportunities for new social and technical approaches to content moderation. Seering will begin by demonstrating the role of behavioral imitation and deterrence in moderating the spread of anti-social behaviors in online chatrooms, and he will connect this to a broader arc of research on the impact of volunteer moderator presence on community member behaviors. Next, he will present an inductively-developed framework for volunteer moderators’ processes and social roles in their communities. Finally, Seering will demonstrate the direct applications of these findings at a larger scale through an in-depth case study where the strengths of community self-governance were leveraged to address a massive influx of hate to LGBTQ+ communities.

Bio: Joseph Seering is a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Stanford University and an affiliated fellow at the Yale Social Media Governance Initiative. His work focuses on the social and organizational dynamics of moderation systems on online social platforms, exploring ways in which users’ self-governance behaviors can be strengthened. His work begins with empirical analyses to understand community behaviors and challenges, and he translates the resulting findings into the design and development of new systems. He has received awards for his papers at the ACM CHI, CSCW, and CHI PLAY conferences, and was recently named one of the CCC/CRA Computing Innovation Fellows of 2021.