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Transgender and nonbinary social media users experience disproportionate content removals on social media platforms, even when content does not violate platforms’ guidelines. In 2022, the Oversight Board, which oversees Meta platforms’ content moderation decisions, invited public feedback on Instagram’s removal of two trans users’ posts featuring their bare chests, introducing a unique opportunity to hear trans users’ feedback on how nudity and sexual activity policies impacted them. We conducted a qualitative analysis of 83 comments made public during the Oversight Board’s public comment process. Commenters criticized Meta’s nudity policies as enforcing a cisnormative view of gender while making it unclear how images of trans users’ bodies are moderated, enabling the disproportionate removal of trans content and limiting trans users’ ability to use Meta’s platforms. Yet there was significant divergence among commenters about how to address cisnormative moderation. Some commenters suggested that Meta clarify nudity guidelines, while others suggested that Meta overhaul them entirely, removing gendered distinctions or fundamentally reconfiguring the platform’s relationship to sexual content. We then discuss how the Oversight Board’s public comment process demonstrates the value of incorporating trans people’s feedback while developing policies related to gender and nudity, while arguing that Meta must go beyond only revising policy language by reevaluating how cisnormative values are encoded in all aspects of its content moderation systems.
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Content Removal as a Moderation Strategy: Compliance and Other Outcomes in the ChangeMyView Community
Moderators of online communities often employ comment deletion as a tool. We ask here whether, beyond the positive effects of shielding a community from undesirable content, does comment removal actually cause the behavior of the comment’s author to improve? We examine this question in a particularly well-moderated community, the ChangeMyView subreddit. The standard analytic approach of interrupted time-series analysis unfortunately cannot answer this question of causality because it fails to distinguish the effect of having made a non-compliant comment from the effect of being subjected to moderator removal of that comment. We therefore leverage a “delayed feedback” approach based on the observation that some users may remain active between the time when they posted the non-compliant comment and the time when that comment is deleted. Applying this approach to such users, we reveal the causal role of comment deletion in reducing immediate noncompliance rates, although we do not find evidence of it having a causal role in inducing other behavior improvements. Our work thus empirically demonstrates both the promise and some potential limits of content removal as a positive moderation strategy, and points to future directions for identifying causal effects from observational data.
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- PAR ID:
- 10113291
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3359265
