The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 26 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
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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“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
In the citing paper
“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
Citations
Cites
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The work of sustaining order in wikipedia: the banning of a vandal
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Research works printed but not linked: 5
- Ananny M. (2018). Checking in with the Facebook fact-checking partnership. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved from https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/facebook-fact-checking-partnerships.php
- Grimmelmann J., 2015, The virtues of moderation (SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2588493)
- Gupta A., 2016, Towards a better inclusivity: Online comments and community at news organizations
- Kirchner L. (2011). AOL settled with unpaid “volunteers” for $15 million. Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved from https://archives.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/aol_settled_with_unpaid_volunt.php
- Matias J. N., Johnson A., Boesel W. E., Keegan B., Friedman J., DeTar C. (2015). Reporting, reviewing, and responding to harassment on Twitter. arXiv. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.03359 · arXiv
Cited by
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Baumgartner, J., Zannettou, S., Keegan, B., Squire, M., & Blackburn, J. (2020) · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · doi:10.1609/icwsm.v14i1.7347 · Cited by 881
Matias, J. N. (2019) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1813486116 · Cited by 208
“These volunteer teams create rules (32), monitor activity (33), carry out policy interventions, and report serious cases to platforms and law enforcement (34).”
BackgroundSelf-citationSteiger, M., Bharucha, T. J., Venkatagiri, S., Riedl, M. J., & Lease, M. (2021) · Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3411764.3445092 · Cited by 222
“Such volunteer moderation has been key to many online communities and groups and can be understood as a form of civic labor [93, 94].”
BackgroundSeering, J. (2020) · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · doi:10.1145/3415178 · Cited by 174
“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.”
BackgroundInfluentialDrawing from justice theories to support targets of online harassment
Schoenebeck, S., Haimson, O. L., & Nakamura, L. (2021) · New Media & Society · doi:10.1177/1461444820913122 · Cited by 84
“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…”
Background
Metadata
- 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
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