Joseph Seering : Two Conceptual Approaches for Understanding Online Content Moderation

Abstract: Across the web, users post hundreds of billions of pieces of content daily, and decisions about how to moderate this content will shape the future of public speech. While various models for moderation have been explored by platforms and in academia, most of the discussion has focused on the decisions that platforms like Facebook and Twitter make about the permissibility of any given post, comment, or user creation, frequently with the support of complex content moderation algorithms. Discussed less frequently are models that allow users to moderate their own spaces or that discourage problematic behavior proactively, i.e., before it has been posted.

In this talk, I will discuss two conceptual approaches to exploring new possible structural models for moderation. The first of these, Helberger, Pierson, and Poell's cooperative responsibility, takes an organizational approach to propose a process that reaches collective agreement between stakeholders over division of responsibilities. The second approach uses metaphors as a way both to better understand users' practices and roles in moderation and to inspire new types of designs of moderation tools that can more effectively serve the needs of different types of users.

Bio: Joseph Seering is a postdoctoral fellow in the Computer Science Department and Human-AI Institute at Stanford University. He recently received his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. His primary work focuses on understanding community self-governance in online spaces and developing tools to support volunteer moderators in their work. He has received awards for his papers at the ACM CHI, CSCW, and CHI PLAY conferences. His research has been funded by the K&L Gates Presidential Fellowship for Ethics and Computational Technologies and a Carnegie Mellon University Presidential Fellowship.