Can crowdsourcing rescue the social marketplace of ideas?

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential and challenges of using community-based crowdsourcing for content moderation on social media platforms, emphasizing the need for multidisciplinary research to improve effectiveness.

Contribution

It provides an overview of community-based moderation approaches, analyzes Twitter's Birdwatch data, and highlights the importance of collaborative rather than validation-focused crowd efforts.

Findings

Community-based moderation has potential benefits.

Validation-focused crowd efforts may lead to pitfalls.

Multidisciplinary research is needed to improve moderation strategies.

Abstract

Facebook and Twitter recently announced community-based review platforms to address misinformation. We provide an overview of the potential affordances of such community-based approaches to content moderation based on past research and preliminary analysis of Twitter's Birdwatch data. While our analysis generally supports a community-based approach to content moderation, it also warns against potential pitfalls, particularly when the implementation of the new infrastructure focuses on crowd-based "validation" rather than "collaboration." We call for multidisciplinary research utilizing methods from complex systems studies, behavioural sociology, and computational social science to advance the research on crowd-based content moderation.