Best practices for moderation

A comprehensive write-up of existing peer reviewed research on moderation and communities for node staff. This covers important context for how digital communities form and operate; various styles of moderation; likely sources of user and moderator strife; and overall best practices for moderation on the Website League.

Noteworthy community dynamics

Approaches to moderation

Top-down

Bottom-up

Proactive

Justice model

Shortcomings and difficulties of moderation

The moderation process itself

The material being moderated

User and moderator considerations to account for

Solutions, conclusions, and prescriptions

Cultural norms

Actions before the moderation process

Actions during and after the moderation process

References

  1. Sarah Gilbert. 2023. Towards Intersectional Moderation: An Alternative Model of Moderation Built on Care and Power.
  2. Shagun Jhaver, Sucheta Ghoshal, Amy Bruckman, and Eric Gilbert. 2018. Online Harassment and Content Moderation: The Case of Blocklists. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3185593
  3. Cliff Lampe, Paul Zube, Jusil Lee, Chul Hyun Park, and Erik Johnston. 2014. Crowdsourcing civility: A natural experiment examining the effects of distributed moderation in online forums. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0740624X14000021
  4. J. Nathan Matias. 2019a. The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305119836778
  5. J. Nathan Matias. 2019b. Preventing harassment and increasing group participation through social norms in 2,190 online science discussions. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1813486116
  6. Derek Powazek. 2024. On Blocking. Powazek.com. https://powazek.com/posts/3591
  7. Niloufar Salehi. 2024. Do no harm. Logic Magazine. https://logicmag.io/care/do-no-harm/
  8. Sarita Schoenebeck, Oliver L Haimson and Lisa Nakamura. 2021. Drawing from justice theories to support targets of online harassment. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444820913122
  9. Sarita Schoenebeck and Lindsay Blackwell. 2021. Reimagining social media governance: harm, accountability, and repair. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3895779
  10. Angela M. Schöpke-Gonzalez, Shubham Atreja, Han Na Shin, Najmin Ahmed, and Libby Hemphill. 2022. Why do volunteer content moderators quit? Burnout, conflict, and harmful behaviors. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448221138529
  11. Carol Scott, Gabriela Marcu, Riana Elyse Anderson, Mark Newman, and Sarita Schoenebeck. 2023. Trauma-Informed Social Media: Towards Solutions for Reducing and Healing Online Harm. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581512
  12. Joseph Seering, Tony Wang, Jina Yoon, and Geoff Kaufman. 2019. Moderator engagement and community development in the age of algorithms. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444818821316
  13. Hibby Thach, Samuel Mayworm, Daniel Delmonaco, and Oliver Haimson. 2022. (In) visible moderation: A digital ethnography of marginalized users and content moderation on Twitch and Reddit. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448221109804