The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online

Abstract

Volunteer moderators create, support, and control public discourse for millions of people online, even as moderators’ uncompensated labor upholds platform funding models. What is the meaning of this work and who is it for? In this article, I examine the meanings of volunteer moderation on the social news platform reddit. Scholarship on volunteer moderation has viewed this work separately as digital labor for platforms, civic participation in communities, or oligarchy among other moderators. In mixed-methods research sampled from over 52,000 subreddit communities and in over a dozen interviews, I show how moderators adopt all of these frames as they develop and re-develop everyday meanings of moderation—facing the platform, their communities, and other moderators alike. I also show how this civic notion of digital labor brings clarity to a strike by moderators in July 2015. Volunteer governance remains a common approach to managing social relations, conflict, and civil liberties online. Our ability to see how communities negotiate the meaning of moderation will shape our capacity to address digital governance as a society.

Preventing harassment and increasing group participation through social norms in 2,190 online science discussions

“…To meet these context-specific needs, hundreds of thousands of volunteer community moderators provide the most local form of governance for communities that sometimes grow to tens of millions of subscribers (31). These volunteer teams create rules (32), monitor activity (33), carry out policy interventions, and report serious cases to platforms and law enforcement (34).…”

“…Because these community moderators create and administer policy for millions of people in data-rich online environments (34), moderators have unique opportunities to conduct field experiments on social norms. In the social sciences, researchers have used field experiments to validate existing theories or identify new phenomena and hypotheses for further investigation (35,36).…”

Free Speech and Safe Spaces: How Moderation Policies Shape Online Discussion Spaces

“…Moderators play an important role in preventing disruptive users like trolls or spam from taking over forums (Brunton, 2013). Moderator powers often include the ability to screen, modify, and delete comments, or ban users (Matias, 2016). Consequently, moderators have more power to affect the discussion in online forums than other forum participants.…”

Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media: Towards Theorising Public Lives on Private Platforms

“…Further, low-paid content moderators, mostly working in Asia and South America, do the work of viewing and removing content that violates 'community' standards (Chen, 2014). Reddit, for instance, turns largely on the labour of volunteer moderators who must negotiate complex relationships between the platforms their subreddits operate on, the communities they manage, and other moderators they work with (Matias, 2016). From ordinary users, to highly-visible influencers, to below the line moderators, a range of actors do the work of digitising social relations; from transcribing them into databases, and then coding them in the form of likes, shares, comments, tags, flags, and reports.…”