Disproportionate deletion and different content moderation experiences of conservative, transgender, and black social media users: gray areas of marginalization and moderation

Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction Volume 5 CSCW2 October 2021 Article number: 466 pp 1-35 https://doi.org/10.1145/3479610

Commentary

This study conducted a mixed-methods study involving qualitative and quantitative analysis of survey data to determine which types of social media users delete content and accounts more frequently than others, and how deleted content differs across groups.

Three groups of social media users

Political conservatives

Transgender people

Black people

When compared to these groups, we found that they experienced content and account deletions more frequently than the other groups.

However, the type of content removed from each group resulted in significantly different results, with content removed by conservative participants including content that was offensive or allegedly so, misinformation, Covid-related, adult, or malicious.

It was observed that content from transgender participants was either critical of the dominant group (male, white, etc.) or removed as adult, even though it followed the site's guidelines.

Removed content from participants of color was often related to racial justice or racism.

Removals of conservative participants, transgender and black participants removed despite following site policies to be removed, were categorized as gray areas of content moderation and often contained content related to representations of identity left behind.

Therefore, this research will describe potential ways to make content moderation fairer for stranded social media users, such as specifically accepting and designing gray areas of content moderation.