The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2413985 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J Nathan Matias (0000-0001-8910-0208, Princeton University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 205630511983677 |
| Publication date | 2019-04-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Media + Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2056-3051 • E-ISSN: 2056-3051 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/2056305119836778 |
| OpenAlex | W2928915328 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 51 |
| References cited | 20 |
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
CLARITY · Corporate governance · Economics · Management · Moderation · Negotiation · Political science · Public relations · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Law · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology
The algorithmic capture of subjectivity
Crowdsourcing the Mitigation of disinformation and misinformation
Reddit quarantined
Localizing Content Moderation
Who is responsible for interventions against problematic comments? Comparing user attitudes in Germany and the United States
AI as Governance
The Pushshift Reddit Dataset
Standing up to problematic content on social media
Social Media's kangaroo court and censorship
The weaponization of platform governance
How harassment and hate speech policies have changed over time
‘Recreational shaming groups of Facebook
The downsides of digital labor
App store governance
Effective reporting system to encourage users’ reporting behavior in social media platforms
Boundary Control as Gatekeeping in Facebook Groups
R/WatchRedditDie and the politics of reddit’s bans and quarantines
The hidden architects of the internet
Moderation and authority-building process
Narratives of Change to Platform Governance on DTube, an Emerging Blockchain-Based Video-Sharing Platform
Networked Responses to Networked Harassment? Creators’ Coordinated Management of “Hate Raids” on Twitch
Addressing Toxicity and Extremism in Games
Drawing from justice theories to support targets of online harassment
A critical appraisal of diversity in digital knowledge production
Chat groups as local civic infrastructure
The owners of information
Why do volunteer content moderators quit? Burnout, conflict, and harmful behaviors
Governance dynamics in online communities
Decoding revision mechanisms in Wikipedia
Metaphors in moderation
Regulation by users – the crowdsourced adjudication entities and emerging regulabour on Douyin
Reshaping platform governmentality
Matching, friending, and swiping for sperm donors
Shifting platform governance
Health and toxicity in content moderation
Antecedents of support for social media content moderation and platform regulation
Politics of Deliberate Inaction
The importance of centering harm in data infrastructures for ‘soft moderation
The psychology of volunteer moderators
Mèmes et politique
The psychological impacts of content moderation on content moderators
Keeping users experiencing a suicidal crisis safe online
Normative White Internet Practices
Governing the Global Square
Moderating for a friend of mine
Collective Civic Moderation for Deliberation? Exploring the Links between Citizens’ Organized Engagement in Comment Sections and the Deliberative Quality of Online Discussions
Affordances-in-Practice
From Volunteerism to Corporatization
Decentralizing Platform Power
Automated Platform Governance Through Visibility and Scale
Gaming Algorithmic Hate-Speech Detection
The Reader-to-Leader Framework
Bot-based collective blocklists in Twitter
Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production
Getting political on social network sites
What is a flag for? Social media reporting tools and the vocabulary of complaint
Gamergate and The Fappening
America Online volunteers
Emerging Sources of Labor on the Internet
The politics of 'platforms
Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science
Free Labor
Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
| Citations per year | 8.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2026 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |