Human–computer interaction (HCI) and natural language processing (NLP) research increasingly explore large language model (LLM) support for online content moderation tasks. This study conducts a value sensitive design process with volunteer moderators of two heavily moderated subreddits (history Q&A, and legal advice). Through an empirical investigation using iterative interviews and a conceptual investigation centered in virtue ethics, we find moderators center values of care, wisdom, and civics in their work. A technical investigation then matches these values to the known capabilities and limitations of LLMs. We find current LLMs potentially well-suited to supporting care in managing sensitive content and wisdom in bridging content to context. However, many aspects of civic community-building are challenging to support with today’s models. Our study provides guidelines for designing LLM support for moderation tools and demonstrates value sensitive design methods to connect work practices, values, and the possibilities and limits of automation.

Extensive efforts in automated approaches for content moderation have been focused on developing models to identify toxic, offensive, and hateful content with the aim of lightening the load for moderators.Yet, it remains uncertain whether improvements on those tasks have truly addressed moderators' needs in accomplishing their work.In this paper, we surface gaps between past research efforts that have aimed to provide automation for aspects of content moderation and the needs of volunteer content moderators, regarding identifying violations of various moderation rules.To do so, we conduct a model review on Hugging Face to reveal the availability of models to cover various moderation rules and guidelines from three exemplar forums.We further put state-of-the-art LLMs to the test, evaluating how well these models perform in flagging violations of platform rules from one particular forum.Finally, we conduct a user survey study with volunteer moderators to gain insight into their perspectives on useful moderation models.Overall, we observe a nontrivial gap, as missing developed models and LLMs exhibit moderate to low performance on a significant portion of the rules.Moderators' reports provide guides for future work on developing moderation assistant models.

Online content moderation has become the subject of intense debate as policymakers and platform developers aim to balance values such as freedom of expression and community safety. Despite the impact of content moderation on public discourse and online experiences, the debate surrounding content moderation regulation rarely involves those impacted by these decisions. To explore how to engage individuals in learning opportunities that deepen understanding of social and technical aspects of online content moderation, we designed and tested an educational game: CONTENTR. The game gives participants experience debating and making decisions about platform governance. We used the Values at Play (VAP) game design framework to discover and translate social values into game elements, and then verified both values translation and learning outcomes using qualitative feedback from three phases of testing. We found that gameplay facilitated collaborative discussion and decision-making regarding the challenges of designing an online platform for mass appeal. Both tabletop and online versions of the game are available on our project website. Our findings highlight how gameplay can create a deeper understanding of the challenges involved in developing and enforcing online content policies, and challenge participants' pre-existing values and assumptions through both game elements and exposure to other participants' perspectives. We believe the game will be useful in courses ranging from civics and technology policy to information and computer science.

Social computing scholars have long known that people do not interact with knowledge in straightforward ways, especially in digital environments. While policies around knowledge are essential for targeting misinformation, they are value-laden; in choosing how to present information, we undermine non-traditional, often non-Western, ways of knowing. Epistemic injustice is the systemic exclusion of certain people and methods from the knowledge canon. Epistemic injustice chips away at one's testimony and vocabulary until they are stripped of their due right to know and understand. In this paper, we articulate how epistemic injustice in sociotechnical applications leads to material harm. Inspired by a hybrid collaborative autoethnography of 14 CSCW practitioners, we present three cases of epistemic injustice in sociotechnical applications: online transgender healthcare, identity sensemaking on r/bisexual, and Indigenous ways of knowing on r/AskHistorians. We further explore signature tensions across our autoethnographic materials and relate them to previous CSCW research areas and personal non-technological experiences. We argue that epistemic injustice can serve as a unifying and intersectional lens for CSCW research by surfacing dimensions of epistemic community and power. Finally, we present a call to action of three changes the CSCW community should make to move toward its own goals of research justice. We call for CSCW researchers to center individual experiences, bolster communities, and remediate issues of epistemic power as a means towards epistemic justice. In sum, we recount, synthesize, and propose solutions for the various forms of epistemic injustice that CSCW sites of study---including CSCW itself---propagate.

Reddit is one of the world's most prominent social media platforms, and also a valuable source of data for internet researchers. However, working with this kind of data also presents novel ethical complications for researchers, including issues around privacy, vulnerable populations, and unintended consequences. This paper describes an analysis of 134 papers that rely on Reddit data while also including some discussion of ethical implications and/or considerations by the researchers. Our analysis of these papers reveals common ethical issues and ethically motivated methodological decisions, as described by the researchers themselves, while also exposing some gaps for further ethical contemplation for researchers relying on Reddit data. Based on these findings, we close with a set of recommendations for ethically-informed methods and reflection for researchers working with social data.

Shortcomings of current models of moderation have driven policy makers, scholars, and technologists to speculate about alternative models of content moderation. While alternative models provide hope for the future of online spaces, they can fail without proper scaffolding. Community moderators are routinely confronted with similar issues and have therefore found creative ways to navigate these challenges. Learning more about the decisions these moderators make, the challenges they face, and where they are successful can provide valuable insight into how to ensure alternative moderation models are successful. In this study, I perform a collaborative ethnography with moderators of r/AskHistorians, a community that uses an alternative moderation model, highlighting the importance of accounting for power in moderation. Drawing from Black feminist theory, I call this "intersectional moderation." I focus on three controversies emblematic of r/AskHistorians' alternative model of moderation: a disagreement over a moderation decision; a collaboration to fight racism on Reddit; and a period of intense turmoil and its impact on policy. Through this evidence I show how volunteer moderators navigated multiple layers of power through care work. To ensure the successful implementation of intersectional moderation, I argue that designers should support decision-making processes and policy makers should account for the impact of the sociotechnical systems in which moderators work.

Online communities provide important functions in their participants' lives, from providing spaces to discuss topics of interest to supporting the development of close, personal relationships. Volunteer moderators play key roles in maintaining these spaces, such as creating and enforcing rules and modeling normative behavior. While these users play important governance roles in online spaces, less is known about how the work they do is impacted by platform design and culture. r/AskHistorians, a Reddit-based question and answer forum dedicated to providing users with academic-level answers to questions about history, provides an interesting case study on the impact of design and culture because of its unique rules and their strict enforcement by moderators. In this article I use interviews with r/AskHistorians moderators and community members, observation, and the full comment log of a highly upvoted thread to describe the impact of Reddit's design and culture on moderation work. Results show that visible moderation work that is often interpreted as censorship, and the default masculine whiteness of Reddit create challenges for moderators who use the subreddit as a public history site. Nonetheless, r/AskHistorians moderators have carved a space on Reddit where, through their public scholarship work, the community serves as a model for combating misinformation by building trust in academic processes.