Related papers: Will Admins Cope? Decentralized Moderation in the …
Community-level blocklists are key to content moderation practices in decentralized social media. These blocklists enable moderators to prevent other communities, such as those acting in bad faith, from interacting with their own -- and, if…
Mainstream social media platforms function as "walled garden" ecosystems that restrict user agency, control, and data portability. They have demonstrated a lack of transparency that contributes to a multitude of online harms. Our research…
Middleware, third-party software intermediaries between users and platforms, has been broached as a means to decentralize the power of social media platforms and enhance user agency. Middleware may enable a more user-centric and democratic…
A recent surge of users migrating from Twitter to alternative platforms, such as Mastodon, raised questions regarding what migration patterns are, how different platforms impact user behaviors, and how migrated users settle in the migration…
The migration of Twitter users to Mastodon following Elon Musk's acquisition presents a unique opportunity to study collective behavior and gain insights into the drivers of coordinated behavior in online media. We analyzed the social…
Digital public health monitoring has long relied on data from major social media platforms. Twitter was once an indispensable resource for tracking disease outbreaks and public sentiment in real time. Researchers used Twitter to monitor…
Social media platforms struggle to protect users from harmful content through content moderation. These platforms have recently leveraged machine learning models to cope with the vast amount of user-generated content daily. Since moderation…
Bots, simply defined as accounts controlled by automation, can be used as a weapon for online manipulation and pose a threat to the health of platforms. Researchers have studied online platforms to detect, estimate, and characterize bot…
ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol that has gained significant attention from the media for its ability to communicate through the Fediverse, short for the federated web. Servers such as Mastodon implement the…
After Twitter's ownership change and policy shifts, many users reconsidered their go-to social media outlets and platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads became attractive alternatives in the battle for users. Based on the data from…
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…
An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks, further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the social world…
Facebook and Twitter recently announced community-based review platforms to address misinformation. We provide an overview of the potential affordances of such community-based approaches to content moderation based on past research and…
Online LGBTQ+ communities face a persistent tension: remaining visible to welcome newcomers while protecting members from harassment. This challenge is particularly acute for lesbian communities on Reddit, which operate not as isolated…
Social media are shifting towards pluralism -- community-governed platforms where groups define their own norms. What violates rules in one community may be perfectly acceptable in another. Can AI models help moderate such pluralistic…
Twitter may be considered as a decentralized social information processing platform whose users constantly receive their followees' information feeds, which they may in turn dispatch to their followers. This decentralization is not devoid…
The overreaches of mainstream social media platforms have been extensively reported and studied. For activist communities, these platforms pose risks of surveillance, censorship, or erasure. Decentralized social networks (DSNs) serve as…
The global public sphere has changed dramatically over the past decades: a significant part of public discourse now takes place on algorithmically driven platforms owned by a handful of private companies. Despite its growing importance,…
To foster an active and engaged community, social networks employ recommendation algorithms that filter large amounts of contents and provide a user with personalized views of the network. Popular social networks such as Facebook and…
One of the most expensive parts of maintaining a modern information-sharing platform (e.g., web search, social network) is the task of content-moderation-at-scale. Content moderation is the binary task of determining whether or not a given…