Content Moderation Justice and Fairness on Social Media: Comparisons Across Different Contexts and Platforms

Abstract

Social media users may perceive moderation decisions by the platform differently, which can lead to frustration and dropout. This study investigates users' perceived justice and fairness of online moderation decisions when they are exposed to various illegal versus legal scenarios, retributive versus restorative moderation strategies, and user-moderated versus commercially moderated platforms. We conduct an online experiment on 200 American social media users of Reddit and Twitter. Results show that retributive moderation delivers higher justice and fairness for commercially moderated than for user-moderated platforms in illegal violations; restorative moderation delivers higher fairness for legal violations than illegal ones. We discuss the opportunities for platform policymaking to improve moderation system design.