Moderation in the Wild: Investigating User-Driven Moderation in Online Discussions

Neele Falk, Eva Vecchi, Iman Jundi, Gabriella Lapesa


Abstract
Effective content moderation is imperative for fostering healthy and productive discussions in online domains. Despite the substantial efforts of moderators, the overwhelming nature of discussion flow can limit their effectiveness. However, it is not only trained moderators who intervene in online discussions to improve their quality. “Ordinary” users also act as moderators, actively intervening to correct information of other users’ posts, enhance arguments, and steer discussions back on course.This paper introduces the phenomenon of user moderation, documenting and releasing UMOD, the first dataset of comments in whichusers act as moderators. UMOD contains 1000 comment-reply pairs from the subreddit r/changemyview with crowdsourced annotations from a large annotator pool and with a fine-grained annotation schema targeting the functions of moderation, stylistic properties(aggressiveness, subjectivity, sentiment), constructiveness, as well as the individual perspectives of the annotators on the task. The releaseof UMOD is complemented by two analyses which focus on the constitutive features of constructiveness in user moderation and on thesources of annotator disagreements, given the high subjectivity of the task.
Anthology ID:
2024.eacl-long.60
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian’s, Malta
Editors:
Yvette Graham, Matthew Purver
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
992–1013
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.60
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Neele Falk, Eva Vecchi, Iman Jundi, and Gabriella Lapesa. 2024. Moderation in the Wild: Investigating User-Driven Moderation in Online Discussions. In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 992–1013, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Moderation in the Wild: Investigating User-Driven Moderation in Online Discussions (Falk et al., EACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.60.pdf