Time and Date: February 18, 3-4pm CEST
Content moderation from adjudication to consensus-building
Emillie de Keulenaar
Though content moderation has not disappeared under Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s new moderation philosophies, the transformations it has undergone remain unclear and inconsistent. In this talk, I want to delve deeper into a counter-intuitive development that has gathered less attention in journalistic and scholarly circles: the development of so-called “consensus-building” moderation mechanisms.
Though content moderation has visibly veered towards a normatively agnostic take in favour of freedom of expression, at the same time it has invested in systems that attempt to “crowdsource consensus” (via Community Notes), or “bridge divides” via a variety of “bridging systems” within ranking, recommenders and LLM applications.
While this development appears to pave a road for content moderation to contribute to “healthier” public debate, questions remain about (1) the role of public institutions in modelling “bridging systems” for private platforms with distinct financial and political interests; and (2) the underlying concepts that are baked into operationalisations of “consensus-building” in algorithmic systems.
In discussing this idea, I also point to empirical methods for analysing “consensus-building” moderation techniques as alternatives to suspension, demotion and flagging. This means using datasets provided by the platform itself — Community Notes datasets or other — as well as tracing the genesis and overall transformation that these techniques have undergone from application to application.
Presenting Author
Emillie de Keulenaar is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Open Intelligence Lab, and a research consultant for the UN DPPA Innovation Cell. Her research lies on the formation of speech norms in social media content moderation and their impact in the formation of online counter-spheres. With the UN DPPA Innovation Cell, she develops analytical software and research methods for monitoring public conflict and dialogue processes across the web.
About the Series
This talk is part of the series Behind the Scenes – Conversations on Empirical Platform Governance Research that invites scholars in this field to share their experiences and views, fostering community exchange about how we can study platform governance in this challenging context. It is hosted by the Lab “Platform Governance, Media, and Technology” (PGMT) at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI), University of Bremen, and the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen.
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