Community Moderation Project
Summary
The Community Moderation Project (CMP) is a qualitative study of how community moderation facilitates online discourse. This project was conceived of and worked on by students, John Crawford and Aaron Mak, as part of the Justice Collaboratory’s Spring 2023 Social Media Governance lab offered to Yale Law School students through the generous support of a grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The goal of this project is to better understand the work, insights, and needs of community moderators, as well as to determine if community moderation should be utilized more widely in the future. Over the Spring ‘23 semester, we examined the role of volunteer moderators as intermediaries between Reddit administrators (admins) and subreddit community members. We paid special attention to controversial subreddits in order to understand how moderators enforce compliance with platform-wide rules with which they do not necessarily agree.
Approach
The CMP combines interviews of Reddit moderators with analysis of existing scholarly discourse on community moderation.
Read the Report
Researchers
Aaron Mak
Researcher
John Crawford
Researcher
Matt Katsaros
Director of the Social Media Governance Initiative
Tom R. Tyler
Macklin Fleming Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology and Founding Director of The Justice Collaboratory