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1. (In)visible moderation: A digital ethnography of marginalized users and content moderation on Twitch and Reddit

   https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221109804  

   Thach, Hibby ; Mayworm, Samuel ; Delmonaco, Daniel ; Haimson, Oliver ( July 2022 , New Media & Society)

   Research suggests that marginalized social media users face disproportionate content moderation and removal. However, when content is removed or accounts suspended, the processes governing content moderation are largely invisible, making assessing content moderation bias difficult. To study this bias, we conducted a digital ethnography of marginalized users on Reddit’s /r/FTM subreddit and Twitch’s “Just Chatting” and “Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches” categories, observing content moderation visibility in real time. We found that on Reddit, a text-based platform, platform tools make content moderation practices invisible to users, but moderators make their practices visible through communication with users. Yet on Twitch, a live chat and streaming platform, content moderation practices are visible in channel live chats, “unban appeal” streams, and “back from my ban” streams. Our ethnography shows how content moderation visibility differs in important ways between social media platforms, harming those who must see offensive content, and at other times, allowing for increased platform accountability. 

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2. Moderation Visibility: Mapping the Strategies of Volunteer Moderators in Live Streaming Micro Communities

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3452918.3458796  

   Cai, Jie ; Wohn, Donghee Yvette ; Almoqbel, Mashael ( June 2021 , IMX '21: ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences)

   null (Ed.)

   Volunteer moderators actively engage in online content management, such as removing toxic content and sanctioning anti-normative behaviors in user-governed communities. The synchronicity and ephemerality of live-streaming communities pose unique moderation challenges. Based on interviews with 21 volunteer moderators on Twitch, we mapped out 13 moderation strategies and presented them in relation to the bad act, enabling us to categorize from proactive and reactive perspectives and identify communicative and technical interventions. We found that the act of moderation involves highly visible and performative activities in the chat and invisible activities involving coordination and sanction. The juxtaposition of real-time individual decision-making with collaborative discussions and the dual nature of visible and invisible activities of moderators provide a unique lens into a role that relies heavily on both the social and technical. We also discuss how the affordances of live-streaming contribute to these unique activities. 

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3. Understanding Rules in Live Streaming Micro Communities on Twitch

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3452918.3465491  

   Cai, Jie ; Guanlao, Cameron ; Wohn, Donghee Yvette ( June 2021 , IMX '21: ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences)

   null (Ed.)

   Rules and norms are critical to community governance. Live streaming communities like Twitch consist of thousands of micro-communities called channels. We conducted two studies to understand the micro-community rules. Study one suggests that Twitch users perceive that both rules transparency and communication frequency matter to channel vibe and frequency of harassment. Study two finds that the most popular channels have no channel or chat rules; among these having rules, rules encouraged by streamers are prominent. We explain why this may happen and how this contributes to community moderation and future research. 

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4. Conceptualizing Visual Analytic Interventions for Content Moderation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VIS49827.2021.9623288  

   Vaidya, Sahaj ; Cai, Jie ; Basu, Soumyadeep ; Naderi, Azadeh ; Wohn, Donghee Yvette ; Dasgupta, Aritra ( October 2021 , 2021 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS))

   Modern social media platforms like Twitch, YouTube, etc., embody an open space for content creation and consumption. However, an unintended consequence of such content democratization is the proliferation of toxicity and abuse that content creators get subjected to. Commercial and volunteer content moderators play an indispensable role in identifying bad actors and minimizing the scale and degree of harmful content. Moderation tasks are often laborious, complex, and even if semi-automated, they involve high-consequence human decisions that affect the safety and popular perception of the platforms. In this paper, through an interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers from social science, human-computer interaction, and visualization, we present a systematic understanding of how visual analytics can help in human-in-the-loop content moderation. We contribute a characterization of the data-driven problems and needs for proactive moderation and present a mapping between the needs and visual analytic tasks through a task abstraction framework. We discuss how the task abstraction framework can be used for transparent moderation, design interventions for moderators’ well-being, and ultimately, for creating futuristic human-machine interfaces for data-driven content moderation. 

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5. Ignoring As a Moderation Strategy for Volunteer Moderators on Twitch

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585704  

   Li, Na ; Cai, Jie ; Wohn, Donghee Yvette ( April 2023 , ACM)

   Content moderation is a crucial aspect of online platforms, and it requires human moderators (mods) to repeatedly review and remove harmful content. However, this moderation process can lead to cognitive overload and emotional labor for the mods. As new platforms and designs emerge, such as live streaming space, new challenges arise due to the real-time nature of the interactions. In this study, we examined the use of ignoring as a moderation strategy by interviewing 19 Twitch mods. Our findings indicated that ignoring involves complex cognitive processes and significant invisible labor in the decision-making process. Additionally, we found that ignoring is an essential component of real-time moderation. These preliminary findings suggest that ignoring has the potential to be a valuable moderation strategy in future interactive systems, which highlights the need to design better support for ignoring in interactive live-streaming systems. 

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