Metaphors in moderation
Abstract
Volunteer content moderators are essential to the social media ecosystem through the roles they play in managing and supporting online social spaces. Recent work has described moderation primarily as a functional process of actions that moderators take, such as making rules, removing content, and banning users. However, the nuanced ways in which volunteer moderators envision their roles within their communities remain understudied. Informed by insights gained from 79 interviews with volunteer moderators from three platforms, we present a conceptual map of the territory of social roles in volunteer moderation, which identifies five categories with 22 metaphorical variants that reveal moderators’ implicit values and the heuristics that help them make decisions. These metaphors more clearly enunciate the roles volunteer moderators play in the broader social media content moderation apparatus and can drive purposeful engagement with volunteer moderators to better support the ways they guide and shape their communities.
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Biographies
Joseph Seering is a PhD candidate in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His work explores the characteristics of online communities that lead to prosocial behaviors, specifically focusing on social roles of moderators and other users with status or authority. He has published work in New Media & Society as well as several ACM conferences including the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative work and Social Computing, the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, and the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Geoff Kaufman is an assistant professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the founding director of the eheart lab, which is devoted to the design and evaluation of persuasive games and interactive technologies intended to change attitudes and behaviors toward prosocial ends. His primary research investigates the psychological connections between individuals and characters in the worlds of narratives and games, and the means by which games and play can be transformative experiences. He has published his work in such venues as the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the Games for Health Journal, and Psychology of Women Quarterly.
Stevie Chancellor is a postdoctoral fellow in Computer Science at Northwestern University. Her research builds and evaluates human-centered machine learning approaches to understand dangerous behaviors in online communities. In particular, she studies high-risk health behaviors, such as suicidal ideation and disordered eating behaviors, and their intersections with prediction technologies and rigor, content moderation, and research ethics. She has published extensively in ACM conferences, including ACM CHI, CSCW, and FAT*.
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Article first published online: October 20, 2020
Issue published: March 2022
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