Online Platform Content Moderation Policy Study

Paper Title:

"Community Guidelines Make this the Best Party on the Internet": An In-Depth Study of Online Platforms' Content Moderation Policies

Published on:

8 May 2024

Primary Category:

Human-Computer Interaction

Paper Authors:

Brennan Schaffner,

Arjun Nitin Bhagoji,

Siyuan Cheng,

Jacqueline Mei,

Jay L. Shen,

Grace Wang,

Marshini Chetty,

Nick Feamster,

Genevieve Lakier,

Chenhao Tan

Bullets

Key Details

•

Performed first large-scale study of moderation policies across 43 top online platforms

•

Focused analysis on copyright, harmful speech, and misleading content policies

•

Built custom web scraper and annotation scheme to gather and analyze policies

•

Found major variation in policy structure, composition, and completeness across platforms and topics

•

Laid groundwork for future research into online moderation policies

Explore the topics in this paper

content_moderation

copyright

harmful_speech

internet_platforms

misinformation

AI generated summary

Online Platform Content Moderation Policy Study

This paper analyzes content moderation policies from 43 major online platforms to understand their approaches to moderating copyright infringement, harmful speech, and misleading content. Using a custom web scraper and unified annotation scheme, the authors find significant variation across platforms and topics attributable to differing legal regimes. The paper lays groundwork for studying evolving moderation policies and their impacts.