What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint
Abstract
The flag is now a common mechanism for reporting offensive content to an online platform, and is used widely across most popular social media sites. It serves both as a solution to the problem of curating massive collections of user-generated content and as a rhetorical justification for platform owners when they decide to remove content. Flags are becoming a ubiquitous mechanism of governance—yet their meaning is anything but straightforward. In practice, the interactions between users, flags, algorithms, content moderators, and platforms are complex and highly strategic. Significantly, flags are asked to bear a great deal of weight, arbitrating both the relationship between users and platforms, and the negotiation around contentious public issues. In this essay, we unpack the working of the flag, consider alternatives that give greater emphasis to public deliberation, and consider the implications for online public discourse of this now commonplace yet rarely studied sociotechnical mechanism.
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For the past two decades, social media has largely followed a centralized paradigm, where power over systems is concentrated among a few actors.
“For the past two decades, social media has largely followed a centralized paradigm, where power over systems is concentrated among a few actors [30,51,76].”
From Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols (2026) · cites this paper as [30]
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“For example, Crawford and Gillespie [30] argue that user “flagging” tools give platforms rhetorical cover for moderation decisions, while concealing the underlying negotiations around content removal [62, 72].”
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- Authors
- Crawford, K., & Gillespie, T.
- Affiliations
- Microsoft Research New York City (United States) (US)
- Cornell University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Crawford, Kate
- Venue
- New Media & Society
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-07-15
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 410-428
- ISSN
- 1461-4448 (ISSN-L)
- 1461-7315
- OpenAlex
- W2136686335
- Cited by
- 496
- References
- 34
- Citations by year
- 2026: 48 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 71 · 2023: 64 · 2022: 66 · 2021: 44 · 2020: 34 · 2019: 40 · 2018: 38 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 2 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 46.99
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- New Media & Society (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Microsoft Research
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Law › Freedom of Expression and Defamation
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
- Keywords
- social media, user-generated content, content moderation, platform governance, online public discourse, public deliberation, algorithmic governance
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