Do You Care Who Flagged This Post? Effects of Moderator Visibility on Bystander Behavior

Abstract

This study evaluates whether increasing information visibility around the identity of a moderator influences bystanders' likelihood to flag subsequent unmoderated harassing comments. In a 2-day preregistered experiment conducted in a realistic social media simulation, participants encountered ambiguous or unambiguous harassment comments, which were ostensibly flagged by either other users, an automated system (AI), or an unidentified moderation source. The results reveal that visibility of a content moderation source inhibited participants' flagging of a subsequent unmoderated harassment comment, presumably because their efforts were seen as dispensable, compared to when the moderation source was unknown. On the contrary, there was an indirect effect of other users versus AI as moderation source on subsequent flagging through changes in perceived social norms. Overall, this research shows that the effects of moderation transparency are complex, as increasing visibility of a content moderator may inadvertently inhibit bystander intervention. Lay Summary: This study examines the effects of flagging unmoderated offensive posts on social media, and how this changes the users' subsequent behavior. We examined users' reactions to the flagging of these posts by other users, an automated system, or an unspecified process to determine whether this affects the users' ensuing behavior. A 2-day experiment on a simulated social media site showed that the visibility of the "flagger"impacts how users perceive social norms and think about the accountability for their own online actions. The results showed that the visibility of the person/system that flagged the material generally deterred subsequent flagging. The analysis also shows that the effect was stronger when the users thought that it was other users, and not an automated system, that had flagged the online harassment.