"Community Guidelines Make this the Best Party on the Internet": An In-Depth Study of Online Platforms' Content Moderation Policies

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes content moderation policies across 43 major online platforms, revealing significant variation in structure and content, and providing a foundation for understanding their impact on users.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive comparison of platform policies on copyright, harmful speech, and misinformation, using a novel web-scraper and annotation scheme.

Findings

Significant variation in policy structure and content across platforms and topics.

Legal differences influence policy composition.

Framework for future analysis of moderation policies.

Abstract

Moderating user-generated content on online platforms is crucial for balancing user safety and freedom of speech. Particularly in the United States, platforms are not subject to legal constraints prescribing permissible content. Each platform has thus developed bespoke content moderation policies, but there is little work towards a comparative understanding of these policies across platforms and topics. This paper presents the first systematic study of these policies from the 43 largest online platforms hosting user-generated content, focusing on policies around copyright infringement, harmful speech, and misleading content. We build a custom web-scraper to obtain policy text and develop a unified annotation scheme to analyze the text for the presence of critical components. We find significant structural and compositional variation in policies across topics and platforms, with some variation attributable to disparate legal groundings. We lay the groundwork for future studies of ever-evolving content moderation policies and their impact on users.