The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online

“These volunteer teams create rules (32), monitor activity (33), carry out policy interventions, and report serious cases to platforms and law enforcement (34).”

“Such volunteer moderation has been key to many online communities and groups and can be understood as a form of civic labor [93, 94].”

“The second theme that Matias notes is “Moderation as Civic Participation” [68, p. 3], which describes the types of leadership, governance, and management that occur in groups both online and offline.”

“On Reddit and Twitch, for example, subreddits or channels rely on volunteer moderators to establish and enforce site policies and norms (Matias, 2019; Seering et al., 2019; Wohn, 2019), and strategies for handling harassment include educating, sympathizing, shaming, humor, and blocking (Cai and…”

“Matias [37] calls out online moderation work as civic labor to recognize this constant negotiation of the meaning and boundary of moderation.”

“The civic labor of moderation [72] also shapes a participant’s identity as “citizen” or “juror” [73].”

“In addition to these struggles about their identity, volunteer moderators also engage with the demands of community members, platforms, and each other [52], which Matias [49, 50] describes as "civic labor.”

“Matias [71] showed that such protest against the platform was still a negotiation among moderators, users, and the platform: Reddit employees played a key role in these negotiations [with Reddit].”

“They “define and redefine what it means to be a moderator in conversation with platform operators, their communities, and other moderators” (Matias, 2019, p. 2), a procedure that aligns with the idea of deliberative democracy.”

“Recent research has described processes of volunteer moderation in online communities, namely Reddit (Dosono and Semaan, 2019; Jhaver et al., 2019; Matias, 2019; Seering et al., 2019), Twitch (Seering et al., 2019; Wohn, 2019), Discord (Jiang et al., 2019; Kiene et al., 2019), and Facebook Groups…”

“These moderators and their actions build and shape online communities [41].”

“Moderation can also be a volunteer activity; Matias (2019) describes content moderation that is carried out by volunteers as a type of civic labor.”

“While platform governance scholarship focuses on “macro”-scale policy, compliance, and legal questions, community governance research focuses on the efforts of users and volunteers to engage in local community norm-setting (Gillespie 2018; Grimmelmann 2015; Seering 2020).”

“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).”

“Platforms also rely on the labour of users themselves in order to moderate content (Matias, 2019).”

“Given the role of group norms in networked harassment, (volunteer) community moderators play a significant role monitoring the identity and ideology of their community as reinforced through moderation decisions (Gillett & Suzor, 2022; Matias, 2019).”

“Moderation is central to the functioning of online communities [85] as moderators “protect people’s capacities to participate in publics” when conflicts arise.”

“Diferent from most social media platforms that handle moderation within, user-governed communities such as Wikipedia and Reddit rely on volunteer moderators who are given limited administrative power to remove unacceptable content and ban violators [41].”

“At the same time, the governance and labor that moderators provide are essential to the online communities they support (Matias, 2019).”

“This burden could come in different forms including time, effort, and affective [47, 69].”

“Prior work has classifed many diferent roles mods play to help the streamer or the community [49, 59, 70].”

“Volunteer moderation by users exists in various spaces, and researchers have referred to it as a form of civic labor in the digital space (Matias, 2019), online civic intervention (Porten‐Chée et al., 2020), or a specific type of corrective action (Lim, 2017; Naab et al., 2019; Ziegele et al.,…”

“’ ” -[P3] Past work observed cross-community interactions between moderators in high-stake scenarios such as collective actions, or when moderators have certain affiliations such as moderating similar communities [48, 49].”

“Volunteer moderation is a main driver for many of today’s mega-platforms, such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitch [6, 51, 71].”

“Research on these platforms has shed light on the community-developed rules and volunteer labor that sustains these platforms (Fiesler et al., 2018; Matias, 2019).”

“Sites such as Reddit rely on volunteer moderators to enforce their policies, and allow communities to define their own standards (Matias 2019).”

“Specifically, moderators are tasked with addressing issues of governance (identifying which rules best serve the communities goals) [12, 14, 31] and of scale (enforcing these rules across potentially thousands of comments each day) [5, 29].”

“However, engaging in such groups requires not only time and commitment, but also a great deal of civil courage, as members can be intimidated and threatened by the individuals they counter (Ley, 2018; Matias, 2019).”

“[8, 24, 26, 30]), having an existing personal connection or friendship with a streamer or moderator (e.”

“Online examples of the second-order social dilemmas of selfgovernance include the problems of incentivizing and supporting peer enforcement [32, 43], moderating moderators [20, 57], and even the emotional labor of thanklessly monitoring violations and administering punishments [72].”

“Platform companies try to counter problematic content with professional moderation (Gillespie, 2018), while online communities have deployed grassroots strategies, including Twitter blocklists (Geiger, 2016) and volunteer moderation (Matias, 2019).”

“…communities has established that once an online space functions as and feels like a community, members are motivated to take on major responsibilities such as moderation in order to help steer and shape communities that they personally find meaningful or topically important [38, 61, 79, 80, 89].”

“For platforms applying community moderation, communities often develop their own rules through discussions among volunteer mods and community members [42, 47].”

“Furthermore, social media scholars are increasingly examining content creation in digital platforms run by diverse social groups (Bärtl, 2018; Bishop, 2019; Matias, 2019).”

“A strong majority of this work has used interview methods [6–8, 10, 11, 13], with a small number using other ethnographic methods [12], quantitative analyses [1, 9], or experiments [8].”

“…analysis because Reddit’s structure already enforces clear topic boundaries–each subreddit is a narrowly scoped, moderator-defined forum with high topical homogeneity [71, 72]–and relies on link flairs rather than inline hashtags for categorization, rendering co-occurrence methods inapplicable [73].”

“Rather than a central corporately-defined moderation strategy, subreddits are primarily governed by volunteer moderators whose substantial unpaid efforts result in the creation and enforcement of unique rules and norms that are highly specific to individual subreddits [85, 91].”

“…for community development and concep‐ tualized volunteer moderation as an ongoing negotia‐ tion in which the meaning of moderation is continuously defined and explained amongst stakeholders such as the platform, community, and fellow moderators (Gillespie, 2018; Matias, 2019; Seering et al., 2019).”

“According to Matias (2019), volunteer moderating is a form of civic labour in which the volunteers do more than just the work associated with their role; they must also negotiate with the platform operators, the other members of their communities and their fellow moderators regarding how moderation…”

“…regulation and jinyan are not unique to live-streaming, the standard of jinyan in live-streaming differs from what has been found in previous moderation practices which focuses on protecting communal members’ fair opportunities to participate in open discussions (Matias, 2019; Nielsen, 2022).”

“We selected Reddit as our study site due to the availability of public data on millions of unique online spaces called subreddits (or “subs”), the diversity of types of subs that exist, the increasing presence of governance bots present in subs, and growing research interest in Reddit [75] and human-bot interaction, m…”

“…set of labor conditions for game creators: Game creators are performing a kind of algorithmic labor [93] to understand and work with Roblox’s recommendation algorithms, and are financially in-centivized to do so; and their moderation work is necessary but also a form of uncompensated labor [55].”

“Although many studies have explored various dimensions of moderation, many of them focus on the role of community members and volunteer moderators [10, 32, 39, 40, 56, 57, 63].”

“Researchers have long peered into the strategies that moderators employ [7, 19, 41, 51, 53], examining the effects of feedback to individual users [14, 29], as well as platform interventions such as community-level quarantines [11, 21] and bans [12, 23, 37].”

“Matias described volunteer moderators as “civic labor” who negotiated their authority and responsibility with platform operators, peer moderators, and community users in everyday practices [64].”

“By providing online platforms with a generalized framework and tooling for understanding ban evasion, moderators will have an easier time not only in detecting instances of ban evasion but also providing evidence for their penalties [24].”

“Moderators must publicly demonstrate concern for a number of stakeholders, including their groups, other moderators, and the platform (Matias, 2019).”

“…and critiques, platforms are strengthening their fact-checking capabilities, increasingly relying on automation (Guo et al., 2022) and volunteer labour (Matias, 2019) in the form of ‘crowdsourced fact-checking’, largely because it is fast, cheap and easily scalable (Arcila and Griffin, 2023).”

“…harmful content or behaviors from within technology-facilitated spaces or interactions could be traced back to early online communities of unpaid volunteers [126] that enforced community norms and rules [89, 120] across platforms like Discord [127], Twitch [151], Reddit [80], and Facebook [48].”

“…Reddit and Twitch, delegates part of administrative duties and power to certain users within online groups or communities, giving them more autonomy in making internal rules and regulating others and content in online communities (Cook et al., 2021; Matias, 2019; Seering, 2020; Thach et al., 2022).”

“…which moderation is carried out by the labour of professionals—so-called ‘commercial content moderation’ (Roberts, 2019)—or volunteer human moderators (Matias, 2019); the use of algorithmic or machine learning methods for moderation (Gillespie et al., 2020; Gonçalves et al., 2021; Myers West,…”

“The discussion of this balance is present in research on those in moderation positions on game-adjacent platforms as well (Goggin, 2018; Matias, 2019; Wohn, 2019).”

“This is particularly prevalent on platforms like Reddit and Facebook, where the scale of interactions frequently outpaces moderators’ capacity to respond promptly [83].”

“Many subreddits also have a formal application and interview process to appoint moderators [65].”

“Prior work has explored how volunteer moderators employ a variety of mechanisms for moderating content, and moderation typically involves a large amount of time and effort to keep up with the massive amounts of content generated within social platforms [26, 32].”

“Matias [40] has described the work of these volunteer moderators as a form of “civic labor”.”

“Moderation involves both “visible” and “invisible” work [29], and is alternatively characterized as “civic labor” [58], “emotional labor” [20], and “care work” [28].”

“…platforms’ promises to be more transparent, users are often left to try and interpret platform decisions, and these conceptions and theories of why shadow bans, censorship, and suspensions occur impact the relationship between users, moderators, and the platform (Matias, 2019; Myers West, 2018).”

“An extension such as the one we propose could be seen as burdening users with additional labor for which they are not compensated [34, 48].”

“Despite not being formally integrated into online governance, volunteer moderators sometimes solicit apologies from offenders, or deliver apologies to targets themselves [47, 62].”

“Users and moderators who invest civic labor in maintaining their discursive space as a shared commodity, free from all sorts of “clutter,” would censor political discussion out of care and respect for the group (Butler et al., 2002; Matias, 2019).”

“These communities are governed by volunteer moderators, usually selected from users active within the community [51, 73, 74].”

“Another approach is community-based moderation, such as flagging systems that allow users to report content that they believe violates rules or conventions [28, 77, 114, 135].”

“The shaping of volunteer moderator’s actions by the platforms architectures have been studied among others by Matias (2019), Chandrasekharan et al. (2018), and A.Gibson (2019), whereas the shaping of in-groups and their toxic norms through Reddit’s upvoting mechanism have been observed by among…”

“It provides specific technological affordances, such as upvoting/downvoting and committed moderators, who play a fundamental role in fostering the community by enacting the content policy, deleting inappropriate posts, and banning policy violators [Matias, 2019].”

“DTC-rich members acquired and exercised “moderation power” (Matias, 2019, p. 2).”

“Meaningful engagement can empower communities such as by enabling participation in defining, identifying, and responding to problematic content, not just relying on top-down decisions made by platforms or governments (Gillespie 2018; Matias 2019).”

“Actually, users acting as content moderators and participating in the content governance of digital platforms become prevalent (Matias 2019a).”

“It is no coincidence that past literature has positioned online community moderators as civic architects [61], and that modern debate about youth online safety evokes arguments about individual rights [68].”