The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Volunteer moderators may experience different types of psychological distress due to their distinct motivational factors and activities compared with commercial content moderators.
“However, volunteer moderators may experience different types of psychological distress due to their distinct motivational factors and the range of activities they engage in which commercial CMs do not (Matias, 2019).”
From The psychological impacts of content moderation on content moderators: A qualitative study (2023) · cites this paper as Matias, 2019
Research to date on the psychological effects of content moderation is sparse and tends to focus on volunteer moderators, who may have different motivations and job-related tasks.
“Research to date examining the psychological effects of this work is sparse and tends to focus on the experience of volunteer moderators who may have a different set of motivations and job-related tasks (Matias, 2019).”
From The psychological impacts of content moderation on content moderators: A qualitative study (2023) · cites this paper as Matias, 2019
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Raemdonck, N. V., Picone, I., & Pierson, J. (2025) · Social Media + Society · doi:10.1177/20563051251319066 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
Tang, Y., Abbazio, J. M., Hew, K. F., & Hara, N. (2021) · Journal of Science Communication · doi:10.22323/2.20070204 · Cited by 6 · see citing works
Nagappa, A. (2023) · Social Media + Society · doi:10.1177/20563051231196881 · Cited by 10 · see citing works
AI red-teaming is a sociotechnical problem: on values, labor, and harms
Gillespie, T., Shaw, R., Gray, M. L., & Suh, J. (2024) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2412.09751 · Cited by 6
Unpacking the Risk of Misinformation: A Communication‐Based Critique
Balog‐Way, D. H. P., & McComas, K. A. (2025) · Risk Analysis · doi:10.1111/risa.70093 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Zhou, H., Lu, Y., Zhao, L., Wang, B., & Li, T. (2023) · Behaviour and Information Technology · doi:10.1080/0144929x.2023.2281491 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
Yoon, J., Zhang, A. X., & Seering, J. (2025) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3711114 · Cited by 8 · see citing works
Who Watches the Birdwatchers? Sociotechnical Vulnerabilities in Twitter’s Content Contextualisation
Benjamin, G. (2022) · Lecture notes in computer science · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-10183-0_1 · Cited by 5 · see citing works
- Authors
- Matias, J. N.
- Affiliations
- Princeton University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Matias, J. Nathan
- ORCID
- Matias, J. Nathan
- Venue
- Social Media + Society
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2019-04
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 2056-3051 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2928915328
- Cited by
- 183
- References
- 26
- Citations by year
- 2026: 30 · 2025: 47 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 29 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 3
- FWCI
- 32.73
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Social Media + Society (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- Microsoft Research
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Industrial relations › Legal and Labor Studies
- Keywords
- volunteer moderators, online content moderation, digital labor, Reddit, subreddits, platform governance, volunteer governance, public discourse, civil liberties, online communities
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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