Reconsidering Self-Moderation: the Role of Research in Supporting Community-Based Models for Online Content Moderation

Research in online content moderation has a long history of exploring different forms that moderation can take, including both user-driven moderation models on community-based platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook Groups, and Reddit, and centralized corporate moderation models on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. In this work we review different approaches to moderation research with the goal of providing a roadmap for both new and established researchers studying community self-moderation. We contrast community-based moderation research with institutional agent-focused moderation research, and argue that the former has an important role to play in shaping discussions about the future of online moderation. We provide six guiding questions for future research that, if answered, can support the development of a form of user-driven moderation that is widely implementable across a variety of social spaces online, offering an alternative to the corporate moderation models that dominate public debate and discussion.