Crowdsourcing Content Moderation on Social Media in China

• In Event: Reimagining Democracy: Politics and New Technologies

Abstract

There is increasingly a large amount of misinformation on social media, and as a result social media platforms are now crowdsourcing some content moderation to users. However, little is known about the implication of this job on amateur moderators' own behaviors and attitudes. Our study looks at content moderation on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. We take advantage of a jury-like community moderation system from 2012 to 2014 in Weibo and exploit the random assignment of misinformation jury cases. Since our treatment has multiple time periods and variation in treatment timing, we employ advanced TWFE estimation methods to estimate the effect of moderation on these users’ subsequent social media behavior.

Authors

• Ali Cirone, London School of Economics

• Andy Zhao, Cornell University