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Developing a strong community requires empowered leadership capable of overcoming governance challenges. New online platforms have given users opportunities to practice governance through content moderation roles. The over 2.8 million…
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…
Online volunteers are an uncompensated yet valuable labor force for many social platforms. For example, volunteer content moderators perform a vast amount of labor to maintain online communities. However, as social platforms like Reddit…
Men experiencing infertility face unique challenges navigating Traditional Masculinity Ideologies that discourage emotional expression and help-seeking. This study examines how Reddit's r/maleinfertility community helps overcome these…
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…
Millions of online communities are governed by volunteer moderators, who shape their communities by setting and enforcing rules, recruiting additional moderators, and participating in the community themselves. These moderators must…
Rules are a critical component of the functioning of nearly every online community, yet it is challenging for community moderators to make data-driven decisions about what rules to set for their communities. The connection between a…
Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content.…
When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In…
Shortcomings of current models of moderation have driven policy makers, scholars, and technologists to speculate about alternative models of content moderation. While alternative models provide hope for the future of online spaces, they can…
Most platforms, including Reddit, face a dilemma when applying interventions such as subreddit bans to toxic communities -- do they risk angering their user base by proactively enforcing stricter controls on discourse or do they defer…
Making online social communities 'better' is a challenging undertaking, as online communities are extraordinarily varied in their size, topical focus, and governance. As such, what is valued by one community may not be valued by another.…
Reddit is in the minority of mainstream social platforms that permit posting content that may be considered to be at the edge of what is permissible, including so-called Not Safe For Work (NSFW) content. However, NSFW is becoming more…
Community rules play a key part in enabling or constraining the behaviors of members in online communities. However, little is unknown regarding whether and to what degree changing rules actually affects community dynamics. In this paper,…
Volunteer moderators play a crucial role in sustaining online dialogue, but they often disagree about what should or should not be allowed. In this paper, we study the complexity of content moderation with a focus on disagreements between…
AI-companionship platforms are rapidly reshaping how people form emotional, romantic, and parasocial bonds with non-human agents, raising new questions about how these relationships intersect with gendered online behavior and exposure to…
Most social network analysis works at the level of interactions between users. But the vast growth in size and complexity of social networks enables us to examine interactions at larger scale. In this work we use a dataset of 76M…
Social media platforms like Facebook and Reddit host thousands of user-governed online communities. These platforms sanction communities that frequently violate platform policies; however, public perceptions of such sanctions remain…
We study the effect of the number of users on the activity of communities within the online content sharing and discussion platform Reddit, called subreddits. We found that comment activity on Reddit has a heavy-tailed distribution, where a…
Toxicity and abuse are common in online peer-production communities. The social structure of peer-production communities that aim to produce accurate and trustworthy information require some conflict and gate-keeping to spur content…