Comment moderators should focus more on hate speech than profanity, a new study suggests » Nieman Journalism Lab
News consumers and social media platform users prioritize the removal of hate speech over the removal of profanity, according to a new study by the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin.
We looked at 3 aspects of comment deletion: type of deleted content, detail of the explanation, & human or algorithm moderation. 🧵https://t.co/Xd8Z5VOay2 @UTexasMoody
The Center for Media Engagement partnered with Erasmus University in the Netherlands and NOVA University in Portugal to understand how the public perceives comment deletion and the moderators who do it in the United States, the Netherlands, and Portugal. They surveyed 902 people in the United States, 975 in the Netherlands, and 993 in Portugal.
In a comment template designed to look like the common commenting platform Disqus, researchers randomly showed survey participants social media posts. Here’s how they did it:
Participants were exposed to a social media post that contained either hate speech or profanity. Then they were exposed to a post from a moderator — either a human or an algorithm — that deleted the initial post because it was offensive. This message either explained specifically why the post was deleted, gave a general sense of why it was deleted with a clickable link to community guidelines for the site, or offered no explanation. Afterward, participants answered questions about how fair or legitimate the deletion was and how transparent or trustworthy the moderator was.
