Reconsidering Community Self-Moderation: The Role of Research in Supporting Community-Based Models for Online Content Moderation

Abstract

Research in online content moderation has a long history of exploring different forms that moderation can take, including both user-driven moderation models on community-based platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook Groups, and Reddit, and centralized corporate moderation models on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. In this work I review different approaches to moderation research with the goal of providing a roadmap for researchers studying community self-moderation. I contrast community-based moderation research with platforms and policies-focused moderation research, and argue that the former has an important role to play in shaping discussions about the future of online moderation. I provide six guiding questions for future research that, if answered, can support the development of a form of user-driven moderation that is widely implementable across a variety of social spaces online, offering an alternative to the corporate moderation models that dominate public debate and discussion.