A Trade-off-centered Framework of Content Moderation

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive framework highlighting the inherent trade-offs in content moderation, emphasizing the importance of balancing cooperation and abuse prevention across diverse contexts.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic trade-off-centered framework for understanding content moderation, addressing the lack of cross-context analysis in prior research.

Findings

Content moderation involves key trade-offs in actions, styles, philosophies, and values.

Facilitating cooperation and preventing abuse are dialectical and inherently conflicting.

The framework can guide researchers, designers, and moderators in better understanding and designing moderation systems.

Abstract

Content moderation research typically prioritizes representing and addressing challenges for one group of stakeholders or communities in one type of context. While taking a focused approach is reasonable or even favorable for empirical case studies, it does not address how content moderation works in multiple contexts. Through a systematic literature review of 86 content moderation papers that document empirical studies, we seek to uncover patterns and tensions within past content moderation research. We find that content moderation can be characterized as a series of trade-offs around moderation actions, styles, philosophies, and values. We discuss how facilitating cooperation and preventing abuse, two key elements in Grimmelmann's definition of moderation, are inherently dialectical in practice. We close by showing how researchers, designers, and moderators can use our framework of trade-offs in their own work, and arguing that trade-offs should be of central importance in investigating and designing content moderation.