Toward A Multi-stakeholder Perspective For Improving Online Content Moderation

Jiang, Jialun

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Toward A Multi-stakeholder Perspective For Improving Online Content Moderation 公开 Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/ms35t972f

Abstract

Online communities have struggled with malicious behavior, and a major way to combat such abuse is content moderation. While content moderation has been effective in addressing problems in online communities, it also faces various challenges, on the levels of both larger platforms and smaller communities, and these challenges often arise from the varying needs of different stakeholders. For example, global platforms need to consider different values and cultures while dealing with the massive amount of content waiting to be reviewed, and communities with different technological infrastructures also have needs for different rules, moderation strategies, and tools. My dissertation provides a multi-stakeholder perspective of the challenges of online content moderation, provides actionable guidelines to address problems for both volunteer and commercial moderation, and argues that different stakeholders and their associated trade-offs should be a central consideration in online content moderation.

In my dissertation, I first describe challenges brought by moderating different technologies by examining the challenges that new platform technology brings to community moderation through a case study of moderating real-time voice on Discord, and argue that community moderators and technology designers should cater to the unique technological infrastructures of individual platforms and communities. My work then investigates the multi-stakeholder tensions in commercial moderation, and reveals varied perceptions of abusive behavior from global social media users, demonstrating the limitations of using a single set of rules to govern global users. Building on my empirical work about the pervasive multi-stakeholder challenges, using a systematic literature review, I propose a framework that centers trade-offs in online content moderation, and show how trade-offs are core to the very definition of content moderation.

This dissertation provides deep, empirical understandings of how multiple stakeholders are involved in content moderation, and how ignoring stakeholders’ needs can lead to serious problems and consequences. By contributing a new way to conceptualize content moderation, my work argues for a future where we start to see different stakeholders, acknowledge their needs, and consciously address the trade-offs between their needs.

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