Towards Effective Crowd-Powered Online Content Moderation

Abstract

Content moderation is an important element of social computing systems that facilitates positive social interaction in online platforms. Current solutions for moderation including human moderation via commercial teams are not effective and have failed to meet the demands of growing volumes of online user generated content. Through a study where we ask crowd workers to moderate tweets, we demonstrate that crowdsourcing is a promising solution for content moderation. We also report a strong relationship between the sentiment of a tweet and its appropriateness to appear in public media. Our analysis on worker responses further reveals several key factors that affect the judgement of crowd moderators when deciding on the suitability of text content. Our findings contribute towards the development of future robust moderation systems that utilise crowdsourcing.