A Trade-off-centered Framework of Content Moderation

Understand

Content moderation research typically prioritizes representing and addressing challenges for one group of stakeholders or communities in one type of context.

• While taking a focused approach is reasonable or even favorable for empirical case studies, it does not address how content moderation works in multiple contexts.
• Through a systematic literature review of 86 content moderation papers that document empirical studies, we seek to uncover patterns and tensions within past content moderation research.
• We find that content moderation can be characterized as a series of trade-offs around moderation actions, styles, philosophies, and values.