Characterizing Community Guidelines on Social Media Platforms

Abstract

Social media platforms use community guidelines to enact governance and moderate content, but the limitation in their moderation capacity forces them to choose the types of misbehavior they focus more on. In this work, we analyze these choices through a content analysis of the community guidelines of 11 major social media platforms. We find 66 different types of rules across their community guidelines, with great variability in the coverage of these rules across different platforms. Our research reveals the types of misbehavior that platforms chose to focus on, and motivates further inquiries into policymaking and content moderation in specific problem areas such as inciting violence and voter suppression.