20 research outputs found
Automated Content Moderation Increases Adherence to Community Guidelines
Online social media platforms use automated moderation systems to remove or
reduce the visibility of rule-breaking content. While previous work has
documented the importance of manual content moderation, the effects of
automated content moderation remain largely unknown. Here, in a large study of
Facebook comments (n=412M), we used a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to
measure the impact of automated content moderation on subsequent rule-breaking
behavior (number of comments hidden/deleted) and engagement (number of
additional comments posted). We found that comment deletion decreased
subsequent rule-breaking behavior in shorter threads (20 or fewer comments),
even among other participants, suggesting that the intervention prevented
conversations from derailing. Further, the effect of deletion on the affected
user's subsequent rule-breaking behavior was longer-lived than its effect on
reducing commenting in general, suggesting that users were deterred from
rule-breaking but not from commenting. In contrast, hiding (rather than
deleting) content had small and statistically insignificant effects. Our
results suggest that automated content moderation increases adherence to
community guidelines.Comment: Accepted at TheWebConf 2023, please cite accordingl
Studying Reddit: A Systematic Overview of Disciplines, Approaches, Methods, and Ethics
This article offers a systematic analysis of 727 manuscripts that used Reddit as a data source, published between 2010 and 2020. Our analysis reveals the increasing growth in use of Reddit as a data source, the range of disciplines this research is occurring in, how researchers are getting access to Reddit data, the characteristics of the datasets researchers are using, the subreddits and topics being studied, the kinds of analysis and methods researchers are engaging in, and the emerging ethical questions of research in this space. We discuss how researchers need to consider the impact of Reddit’s algorithms, affordances, and generalizability of the scientific knowledge produced using Reddit data, as well as the potential ethical dimensions of research that draws data from subreddits with potentially sensitive populations
Shaping Online Dialogue: Examining How Community Rules Affect Discussion Structures on Reddit
Community rules play a key part in enabling or constraining the behaviors of
members in online communities. However, little is unknown regarding whether and
to what degree changing rules actually affects community dynamics. In this
paper, we seek to understand how these behavior-governing rules shape the
interactions between users, as well as the structure of their discussion. Using
the top communities on Reddit (i.e. subreddits), we first contribute a taxonomy
of behavior-based rule categories across Reddit. Then, we use a network
analysis perspective to discover how changing implementation of different rule
categories affects subreddits' user interaction and discussion networks over a
1.5 year period. Our study find several significant effects, including greater
clustering among users when subreddits increase rules focused on structural
regulation and how restricting allowable content surprisingly leads to more
interactions between users. Our findings contribute to research in proactive
moderation through rule setting, as well as lend valuable insights for online
community designers and moderators to achieve desired community dynamics
Understanding the Governance Challenges of Public Libraries Subscribing to Digital Content Distributors
As popular demand for digital information increases, public libraries are
increasingly turning to commercial digital content distribution services to
save curation time and costs. These services let libraries subscribe to
pre-configured digital content packages that become instantly available
wholesale to their patrons. However, these packages often contain content that
does not align with the library's curation policy. We conducted interviews with
15 public librarians in the US to examine their experiences with subscribing to
digital distribution services. We found that the subscribing libraries face
many digital governance challenges, including the sub-par quality of received
content, a lack of control in the curation process, and a limited understanding
of how distribution services operate. We draw from prior HCI and social media
moderation literature to contextualize and examine these challenges. Building
upon our findings, we suggest how digital distributors, libraries, and
lawmakers could improve digital distribution services in library settings. We
offer recommendations for co-constructing a robust digital content curation
policy and discuss how librarian's cooperation and well-deployed content
moderation mechanisms could help enforce that policy. Our work informs the
utility of future content moderation research that bridges the fields of CSCW
and library science
Making Online Communities 'Better': A Taxonomy of Community Values on Reddit
Many researchers studying online social communities seek to make such
communities better. However, understanding what 'better' means is challenging,
due to the divergent opinions of community members, and the multitude of
possible community values which often conflict with one another. Community
members' own values for their communities are not well understood, and how
these values align with one another is an open question. Previous research has
mostly focused on specific and comparatively well-defined harms within online
communities, such as harassment, rule-breaking, and misinformation. In this
work, we ask 39 community members on reddit to describe their values for their
communities. We gather 301 responses in members' own words, spanning 125 unique
communities, and use iterative categorization to produce a taxonomy of 29
different community values across 9 major categories. We find that members
value a broad range of topics ranging from technical features to the diversity
of the community, and most frequently prioritize content quality. We identify
important understudied topics such as content quality and community size,
highlight where values conflict with one another, and call for research into
governance methods for communities that protect vulnerable members.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figure
Pika: Empowering Non-Programmers to Author Executable Governance Policies in Online Communities
Internet users have formed a wide array of online communities with nuanced
and diverse community goals and norms. However, most online platforms only
offer a limited set of governance models in their software infrastructure and
leave little room for customization. Consequently, technical proficiency
becomes a prerequisite for online communities to build governance policies in
code, excluding non-programmers from participation in designing community
governance. In this paper, we present Pika, a system that empowers
non-programmers to author a wide range of executable governance policies. At
its core, Pika incorporates a declarative language that decomposes governance
policies into modular components, thereby facilitating expressive policy
authoring through a user-friendly, form-based web interface. Our user studies
with 17 participants show that Pika can empower non-programmers to author
governance policies approximately 2.5 times faster than programmers who author
in code. We also provide insights about Pika's expressivity in supporting
diverse policies that online communities want.Comment: Under revie