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Residents of communities increasingly rely on geographically focused groups on online social media platforms to access local information. These local groups have the potential to enhance the quality of life in communities by helping residents learn about their communities, connect with neighbors and local organizations, and identify important local issues. Moderators of online community groups—typically untrained volunteers—are key actors in these spaces. However, they are also put in a tenuous position, having to manage the groups while simultaneously navigating desires of platforms, rapidly evolving user practices, and the increasing politicization of local issues. In this paper, we explicate the visions of local community groups put forward by Facebook, Reddit, and NextDoor in their corporate discourse and ask: How do these platforms describe local community groups, particularly in reference to ideal communication and community engagement that occurs within them, and how do they position volunteer moderators to help realize these ideals? Through a qualitative thematic analysis of 849 company documents published between 2012 and 2023, we trace how each company rhetorically positions these spaces as what we refer to as a “local platformized utopias.” We examine how this discourse positions local volunteer moderators, the volunteer labor-force of civic actors that constructs, governs, and grows community groups. We discuss how these three social media companies motivate moderators to do this free, value-building labor through the promise of civic virtue; simultaneously obscuring unequal burdens of moderation labor and failing to address the inequalities of access to voice and power in online life.
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Retiree Volunteerism: Automating "Word of Mouth" Communication
Many retired people engage in volunteer opportunities as a means to give back to their communities, stay physically and intellectually active, and build and expand their social networks. However, our semi-structured interviews of six retirees found that they typically avoid searching for volunteer opportunities through websites and social media due to a lack of trust in those tools and a concern for privacy. Instead, they rely on word-of-mouth communication facilitated through emails with individuals and organizations they trust. To support this type of communication, we designed an adaptive interaction mechanism in the form of a newsletter with volunteer opportunities that are personalized using recommender system technology. The newsletter mechanism leverages personal connections through user-defined preference-based communities that allow users to share volunteer opportunities with their peers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2045153
- PAR ID:
- 10402475
- Editor(s):
- Smith-Renner, A.; Taele, P.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CEUR workshop proceedings
- Volume:
- 3359
- ISSN:
- 1613-0073
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 216-223
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
