Digital Juries: A Civics-Oriented Approach to Platform Governance

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As concerns have grown regarding harmful content spread on social media, platform mechanisms for content moderation have become increasingly significant. However, many existing platform governance structures lack formal processes for democratic participation by users of the platform. Drawing inspiration from constitutional jury trials in many legal systems, this paper proposes digital juries as a civics-oriented approach for adjudicating content moderation cases. Building on existing theoretical models of jury decision-making, we outline a 5-stage model characterizing the space of design considerations in a digital jury process. We implement two examples of jury designs involving blind-voting and deliberation. From users who participate in our jury implementations, we gather informed judgments of the democratic legitimacy of a jury process for content moderation. We find that digital juries are perceived as more procedurally just than existing common platform moderation practices, but also find disagreement over whether jury decisions should be enforced or used as recommendations.