skip to main content

Explore Research Products in the NSF-PAR

Title: Moderation Visibility: Mapping the Strategies of Volunteer Moderators in Live Streaming Micro Communities
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.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1928627
NSF-PAR ID:
10259948
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IMX '21: ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences
Page Range / eLocation ID:
61 - 72
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ( , Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media)
    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 favor revenue generation and user engagement, moderators are under-supported to manage the expansion of online communities. To preserve these online communities, developers and researchers of social platforms must account for and support as much of this labor as possible. In this paper, we quantitatively characterize the publicly visible and invisible actions taken by moderators on Reddit, using a unique dataset of private moderator logs for 126 subreddits and over 900 moderators. Our analysis of this dataset reveals the heterogeneity of moderation work across both communities and moderators. Moreover, we find that analyzing only visible work – the dominant way that moderation work has been studied thus far – drastically underestimates the amount of human moderation labor on a subreddit. We discuss the implications of our results on content moderation research and social platforms. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ( , 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. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ( , CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
    Volunteer moderators (mods) play significant roles in developing moderation standards and dealing with harmful content in their micro-communities. However, little work explores how volunteer mods work as a team. In line with prior work about understanding volunteer moderation, we interview 40 volunteer mods on Twitch — a leading live streaming platform. We identify how mods collaborate on tasks (off-streaming coordination and preparation, in-stream real-time collaboration, and relationship building both off-stream and in-stream to reinforce collaboration) and how mods contribute to moderation standards (collaboratively working on the community rulebook and individually shaping community norms). We uncover how volunteer mods work as an effective team. We also discuss how the affordances of multi-modal communication and informality of volunteer moderation contribute to task collaboration, standards development, and mod’s roles and responsibilities. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ( , 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. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ( , International Journal of Interactive Communication Systems and Technologies)
    Twitch is one of the largest live streaming platforms and is unique from other social media in that it supports synchronous interaction and enables users to engage in moderation of the content through varied technical tools, which include auto-moderation tools provided by Twitch, third-party applications, and home-brew apps. The authors interviewed 21 moderators on Twitch and categorized the current features of real-time moderation tools they are using into four functions (chat control, content control, viewer control, settings control) and explored some new features of tools that they wish to own (e.g., grouping chat by languages, pop out window to hold messages, chat slow down, a set of buttons with pre-written/pre-message content, viewer activity tracking, all in one). Design implications provide suggestions for chatbots and algorithm design and development. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email