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Mainstream platforms’ content moderation systems typically employ generalized “one-size-fits-all” approaches, intended to serve both general and marginalized users. Thus, transgender people must often create their own technologies and moderation systems to meet their specific needs. In our interview study of transgender technology creators (n=115), we found that creators face issues of transphobic abuse and disproportionate content moderation. Trans tech creators address these issues by carefully moderating and vetting their userbases, centering trans contexts in content moderation systems, and employing collective governance and community models. Based on these findings, we argue that trans tech creators’ approaches to moderation offer important insights into how to better design for trans users, and ultimately, marginalized users in the larger platform ecology. We introduce the concept of trans-centered moderation – content moderation that reviews and successfully vets transphobic users, appoints trans moderators to effectively moderate trans contexts, considers the limitations and constraints of technology for addressing social challenges, and employs collective governance and community models. Trans-centered moderation can help to improve platform design for trans users while reducing the harm faced by trans people and marginalized users more broadly. 

Social media users create folk theories to help explain how elements of social media operate. Marginalized social media users face disproportionate content moderation and removal on social media platforms. We conducted a qualitative interview study (n = 24) to understand how marginalized social media users may create folk theories in response to content moderation and their perceptions of platforms’ spirit, and how these theories may relate to their marginalized identities. We found that marginalized social media users develop folk theories informed by their perceptions of platforms’ spirit to explain instances where their content was moderated in ways that violate their perceptions of how content moderation should work in practice. These folk theories typically address content being removed despite not violating community guidelines, along with bias against marginalized users embedded in guidelines. We provide implications for platforms, such as using marginalized users’ folk theories as tools to identify elements of platform moderation systems that function incorrectly and disproportionately impact marginalized users. 

Trans technology – technology created to help address challenges that trans people face – is an important area for innovation that can help improve marginalized people’s lives. We conducted 104 interviews with 115 creators of trans technology to understand how they involved trans people and communities in design processes. We describe projects that used human-centered design processes, as well as design processes that involved trans people in smaller ways, including gathering feedback from users, conducting user testing, or the creators being trans themselves. We show how involving trans people and communities in design is vital for trans technologies to realize their potential for addressing trans needs. Yet we highlight a frequent gap between trans technology design and deployment, and discuss ways to bridge this gap. We argue for the importance of involving community in trans technology design to ensure that trans technology achieves its promise of helping address trans needs and challenges. 

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.