"I Got Flagged for Supposed Bullying, Even Though It Was in Response to Someone Harassing Me About My Disability.": A Study of Blind TikTokers’ Content Moderation Experiences

Title of the Paper

"I Got Flagged for Supposed Bullying, Even Though It Was in Response to Someone Harassing Me About My Disability.": A Study of Blind TikTokers’ Content Moderation Experiences

Bibliographic Information

• Subject Areas: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Media Governance, Accessibility Design
• Keywords: Visual impairment, accessibility design, TikTok, content moderation, platform governance, short video platforms, marginalization, blind community, transformative justice, algorithmic bias

Research Background and Problem

• Problem or Challenge:
  • Most content moderation research focuses on gender or racial marginalization, with limited attention to the experiences of disabled individuals.
  • Blind users on TikTok face numerous challenges with content moderation due to insufficient accessibility and platform governance.
  • When blind users respond to harassment from other users, their sharp language often triggers moderation systems again.
• Significance:
  The active participation of visually impaired individuals on social media (e.g., "BlindTok" content has over 800 million views) highlights the need to study their unique experiences with content moderation and platform governance to prevent further marginalization.
• Motivation and Related Work:
  • Content moderation mechanisms may exacerbate social injustices and online marginalization, particularly for disabled users.
  • This study addresses the research gap in understanding the interaction between blind users and content moderation systems.

Solution

• Methods or Solutions:
  • Conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 TikTok users from the blind community to understand their experiences and feedback regarding content moderation.
  • Used thematic analysis to identify two main themes: the contextual experiences of blind users with content moderation and their responses to moderation.
• Innovations:
  • Identified and systematically described the unique challenges faced by blind users in content moderation, especially the conflicts between accessibility design and moderation strategies.
  • Proposed analyzing moderation issues from the perspective of "transformative justice," framing them as systemic issues of community fairness rather than mere technical flaws.
• Implementation Steps and Techniques:
  1. Identified blind users on TikTok and recruited participants for the study.
  2. Updated interview questions after preliminary discussions to delve deeper into their moderation experiences and response patterns.
  3. Used thematic analysis to code and categorize data, forming two main themes: technology-induced moderation and socially-induced moderation.
  4. Explored solutions and design recommendations based on transformative justice.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:
  • Identified three common scenarios faced by blind users in content moderation: technology-induced issues (e.g., unintentional algorithmic violations), socially-induced issues (e.g., ableist harassment or malicious reporting by other users), and marginalization caused by platform self-protection measures.
  • Highlighted how TikTok's inadequate accessibility design exacerbates user marginalization, such as over-reliance on visual elements in automated moderation leading to misjudgments.
  • Documented blind users' strategies for coping with content moderation: appealing to the platform, seeking help from friends, and self-adapting (e.g., creating backup accounts, modifying speech to avoid triggering algorithms).
• Advantages Compared to Existing Solutions:
  • Emphasized the systemic and social nature of moderation biases rather than solely focusing on technical fixes.
  • Introduced the transformative justice framework, offering a more complex and multi-faceted analytical perspective.
  • Proposed solutions that go beyond reducing moderation false positives to enhancing community cultural awareness and knowledge.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • Platform governance tends to favor punitive moderation over educational moderation, leaving blind users marginalized on both technical and social levels.
  • Content moderation has significant impacts on blind users, including account bans, reduced content visibility, and restricted social interactions.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • Data relies primarily on participants' self-reports, which may involve recall bias.
  • The study's timeframe was fixed, limiting coverage of TikTok's latest content moderation developments.
  • Future research should explore the social media experiences of blind users from diverse cultural backgrounds and their interactions with platform governance.

Design Recommendations

1. Enhance Public Moral Sensitivity Toward Disabled Communities:
   • Organize community education campaigns to promote awareness of visual impairments.
   • Design comment box reminders (e.g., "Please respect the identity and background of the video poster") to encourage polite interactions.
2. Provide Accessible Notifications for Content Violations to Blind Users:
   • Use vibrations or audio alerts to warn of potential content violations.
   • Offer personalized settings for warnings, such as role-based text or short voice alerts.
3. Offer Easily Accessible Moderation Guidelines for Marginalized Users:
   • Regularly push video tutorials on moderation mechanisms to blind users.
   • Create user-friendly community forums for feedback on moderation transparency and fairness.
4. Balance Human and AI Collaboration in Moderation Mechanisms:
   • Assign simple tasks to AI for automated processing, while involving human moderators in complex scenarios.
   • Engage members of the blind community in platform governance to help improve moderation algorithms.

Conclusion

This study provides an in-depth analysis of the unique challenges faced by blind users in TikTok's content moderation processes and highlights the shortcomings of current platform governance. By proposing solutions grounded in transformative justice, it offers a robust theoretical foundation and practical recommendations for designing fair and inclusive digital platforms in the future.