From Community Governance to Customer Service and Back Again: Re-Examining Pre-Web Models of Online Governance to Address Platforms’ Crisis of Legitimacy
Open accessAbstract
As online platforms grow, they find themselves increasingly trying to balance two competing priorities: individual rights and public health. This has coincided with the professionalization of platforms’ trust and safety operations—what we call the “customer service” model of online governance. As professional trust and safety teams attempt to balance individual rights and public health, platforms face a crisis of legitimacy, with decisions in the name of individual rights or public health scrutinized and criticized as corrupt, arbitrary, and irresponsible by stakeholders of all stripes. We review early accounts of online governance to consider whether the customer service model has obscured a promising earlier model where members of the affected community were significant, if not always primary, decision-makers. This community governance approach has deep roots in the academic computing community and has re-emerged in spaces like Reddit and special purpose social networks and in novel platform initiatives such as the Oversight Board and Community Notes. We argue that community governance could address persistent challenges of online governance, particularly online platforms’ crisis of legitimacy. In addition, we think community governance may offer valuable training in democratic participation for users.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Content moderation challenges are compounded by opaque communication, resulting in a crisis of trust.
“These challenges are compounded by opaque communication surrounding content moderation (Cotter, 2023), resulting in a crisis of trust (Zuckerman & Rajendra-Nicolucci, 2023).”
From Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance (2025) · cites this paper as Zuckerman & Rajendra-Nicolucci, 2023
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 12
- Driscoll, K. (2022b). The modem world: A prehistory of social media. Yale University Press.
- Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press.
- Matias, J. N. (2019). Preventing harassment and increasing group participation through social norms in 2,190 online science dis- cussions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(20), 9785-9789. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1813486116 Matrix. (2023). https://matrix.org · DOI · Paper page
- Maxim, K., Parecki, J., & Cornett, C. (2022). How to build a trust and safety team in a year: A practical guide from lessons learned (so far) at zoom. Journal of Online Trust and Safety, 1(4). https://doi.org/10.54501/jots.v1i4.81 · DOI
- Mnookin, J. L. (1996). Virtual(ly) law: The emergence of law in LambdaMoo. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 21(1), JCMC214. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1996.tb 00185.x · DOI
- Paolillo, J. C., & Heald, D. (2002). Democratic participation in the discursive management of Usenet. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 1040-1049). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ HICSS.2002.994060 · DOI
- Smith, M. (1999). Invisible crowds in cyberspace: Measuring and mapping the social structure of USENET. In M. Smith & P. Kollock (Eds.), Communities in cyberspace: Perspectives on new forms of social organization (pp. 195-219). Routledge Press.
- Suler, J. (2004). The online disinhibition effect. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321-326.
- Venkatesh, S., Tyler, T., Meares, T., & Badiei, F. (2021). In a new light: Social media governance reconsidered. Yale Journal of Law & Technology, 23. https://yjolt.org/new-light-social- media-governance-reconsidered When studying MUDs, a form of Role playing game on the InterNET, it is clear that there is a society. (1998). https://mud. co.uk/dvw/mudsasasociety.html
- Zittrain, J. (1997). The rise and fall of sysopdom. Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, 10, 495. https://cyber.harvard. edu/10hjolt495.html
- Zittrain, J. (2019). Three eras of digital governance. https://papers. ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3458435
- Zuckerman, E. (2022). How social media could teach us to be better citizens. Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, 18(3), 36-41.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Decentralized social networks and the future of free speech online
Huang, T. (2024) · Computer Law & Security Review · doi:10.1016/j.clsr.2024.106059 · Cited by 15 · see citing works
Hallinan, B., Rothenstein, O., & John, N. A. (2025) · Communication and Change · doi:10.1007/s44382-025-00018-9
“These challenges are compounded by opaque communication surrounding content moderation (Cotter, 2023), resulting in a crisis of trust (Zuckerman & Rajendra-Nicolucci, 2023).”
- Authors
- Zuckerman, E., & Rajendra-Nicolucci, C.
- Affiliations
- University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)
- Corresponding author
- Zuckerman, Ethan
- Venue
- Social Media + Society
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2023-07
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 2056-3051 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4386548081
- Cited by
- 22
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 3
- FWCI
- 5.52
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Social Media + Society (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst (University of Massachusetts Amherst) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Law › Freedom of Expression and Defamation
- Keywords
- internet governance, community governance, customer service model, trust and safety, individual rights versus public health, Reddit, oversight board, Community Notes, democratic participation
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.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
