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Positive feedback via likes and awards is central to online governance, yet which attributes of users' posts elicit rewards -- and how these vary across authors and communities -- remains unclear. To examine this, we combine…
We construct a two species evolutionary game model of an online society consisting of ordinary users and behavior enforcers (moderators). Among themselves, moderators play a coordination game choosing between being "positive" or "negative"…
Online platforms face pressure to keep their communities civil and respectful. Thus, the bannings of problematic online communities from mainstream platforms like Reddit and Facebook are often met with enthusiastic public reactions.…
It has been a widely shared concern that social media reinforces echo chambers of like-minded users and exacerbate political polarization. While fostering interactions across party lines is recognized as an important strategy to break echo…
Engaging with diverse political views is important for reaching better collective decisions, however, users online tend to remain confined within ideologically homogeneous spaces. In this work, we study users who are members of these spaces…
Online communities serve as essential support channels for People Who Use Drugs (PWUD), providing access to peer support and harm reduction information. The moderation of these communities involves consequential decisions affecting member…
Evaluating the effects of moderation interventions is a task of paramount importance, as it allows assessing the success of content moderation processes. So far, intervention effects have been almost solely evaluated at the aggregated…
This article presents a systematic analysis of the patterns of behavior of individuals as well as groups observed in community-driven platforms for discussion like Reddit, where users usually exchange information and viewpoints on their…
Platforms are increasingly adopting industrial models of moderation that prioritize scalability and consistency, frequently at the expense of context-sensitive and user-centered values. Building on the multi-level governance framework that…
In recent years, Online Social Networks have become an important medium for people who suffer from mental disorders to share moments of hardship, and receive emotional and informational support. In this work, we analyze how discussions in…
Online communities develop unique characteristics, establish social norms, and exhibit distinct dynamics among their members. Activity in online communities often results in concrete ``off-line'' actions with a broad societal impact (e.g.,…
Despite the common use of rule-based tools for online content moderation, human moderators still spend a lot of time monitoring them to ensure that they work as intended. Based on surveys and interviews with Reddit moderators who use…
Many benefits of online communities---such as obtaining new information, opportunities, and social connections---increase with size. Thus, a ``successful'' online community often evokes an image of hundreds of thousands of users, and…
Content moderation practices and technologies need to change over time as requirements and community expectations shift. However, attempts to restructure existing moderation practices can be difficult, especially for platforms that rely on…
Online volunteers are a crucial labor force that keeps many for-profit systems afloat (e.g. social media platforms and online review sites). Despite their substantial role in upholding highly valuable technological systems, online…
Social media sites are often guided by a core group of committed users engaged in various forms of governance. A crucial aspect of this type of governance is deliberation, in which such a group reaches decisions on issues of importance to…
The subreddit r/The_Donald was repeatedly denounced as a toxic and misbehaving online community, reasons for which it faced a sequence of increasingly constraining moderation interventions by Reddit administrators. It was quarantined in…
In many online communities, community leaders (i.e., moderators and administrators) can proactively filter undesired content by requiring posts to be approved before publication. But although many communities adopt post approvals, there has…
When people have the freedom to create and post content on the internet, particularly anonymously, they do not always respect the rules and regulations of the websites on which they post, leaving other unsuspecting users vulnerable to…
Research into community content moderation often assumes that moderation teams govern with a single, unified voice. However, recent work has found that moderators disagree with one another at modest, but concerning rates. The problem is not…