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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…
Effective content moderation systems require explicit classification criteria, yet online communities like subreddits often operate with diverse, implicit standards. This work introduces a novel approach to identify and extract these…
Online harassment, incitement to violence, racist behavior, and other harmful content on social media can damage social harmony and even break the law. Traditional blocklisting technologies can block malicious users, but this comes at the…
Personal moderation tools on social media platforms let users control their news feeds by configuring acceptable toxicity thresholds for their feed content or muting inappropriate accounts. This research examines how four critical…
As an alternative to Twitter and other centralized social networks, the Fediverse is growing in popularity. The recent, and polemical, takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has exacerbated this trend. The Fediverse includes a growing number of…
Social media platforms have been establishing content moderation guidelines and employing various moderation policies to counter hate speech and misinformation. The goal of this paper is to study these community guidelines and moderation…
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…
Stochastic blockmodels and variants thereof are among the most widely used approaches to community detection for social networks and relational data. A stochastic blockmodel partitions the nodes of a network into disjoint sets, called…
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…
The recent development of decentralised and interoperable social networks (such as the "fediverse") creates new challenges for content moderators. This is because millions of posts generated on one server can easily "spread" to another,…
Online communities often overlap and coexist, despite incongruent norms and approaches to content moderation. When communities diverge, decentralized and federated communities may pursue group-level sanctions, including defederation…
Online platforms like Reddit, Wikipedia, and Facebook are integral to modern life, enabling content creation and sharing through posts, comments, and discussions. Despite their virtual and often anonymous nature, these platforms need rules…
Social media platforms have traditionally relied on internal moderation teams and partnerships with independent fact-checking organizations to identify and flag misleading content. Recently, however, platforms including X (formerly Twitter)…
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…
Much of the data being created on the web contains interactions between users and items. Stochastic blockmodels, and other methods for community detection and clustering of bipartite graphs, can infer latent user communities and latent item…
A network is a composition of many communities, i.e., sets of nodes and edges with stronger relationships, with distinct and overlapping properties. Community detection is crucial for various reasons, such as serving as a functional unit of…
The Decentralised Web (DW) has recently seen a renewed momentum, with a number of DW platforms like Mastodon, Peer-Tube, and Hubzilla gaining increasing traction. These offer alternatives to traditional social networks like Twitter,…
The Fediverse, a group of interconnected servers providing a variety of interoperable services (e.g. micro-blogging in Mastodon) has gained rapid popularity. This sudden growth, partly driven by Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, has…
Online community moderators are on the front lines of combating problems like hate speech and harassment, but new modes of interaction can introduce unexpected challenges. In this paper, we consider moderation practices and challenges in…
When toxic online communities on mainstream platforms face moderation measures, such as bans, they may migrate to other platforms with laxer policies or set up their own dedicated websites. Previous work suggests that within mainstream…