Become a Moderator

2020 | Dominique Cardon, Valentine Crosset, Axel Meunier, Donato Ricci | médialab (Sciences Po, France)

Initiated in 2020 as part of a postdoctoral fellowship, this research project began with a modest goal: to organise participatory workshops on content moderation within social networks. The project rapidly expanded its scope, evolving into a broader inquiry into social norms and users’ expectations regarding moderation. Instead of centring solely on platforms or regulators, the study seeks to capture “bottom-up” regulation – namely, everyday judgments by Internet users concerning what is or is not acceptable online. The research addresses two main questions about content reception: first, what role does reception play in shaping how offences are perceived and in constructing norms of acceptable speech? Second, can examining reception help us understand how users participate in moderation? The project’s initial phase involved collecting data from Twitter before API access restrictions. Approximately 5,000 tweets were collected daily using keywords related to deletion requests or reporting. This data informed the creation of sample qualitative interview questions and the design of participatory workshops. Collaborating with designers and students, the team developed a workshop prototype structured as a card game that presented participants with tweets considered problematic. Twenty-nine workshops were conducted to identify the normative processes underlying perceptions of “acceptable speech.” The project is anchored in continuous participatory dynamics. Researchers, designers, students, and participants from diverse backgrounds have been engaged throughout, co-designing workshops, testing various formats, offering feedback, and sharing practices. Such diversity enables a nuanced approach to online social regulation, accounting for both everyday discourse and the public debates surrounding freedom of expression. Another objective is to develop reusable formats that may later inform discussions on digital platform governance. Workshop reports have paved the way for an ongoing analysis of norm construction and a new collaborative investigation with professional practitioners, both of which remain in progress.