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One Style Does Not Regulate All: Moderation Practices in Public and Private WhatsApp Groups

Farhana Shahid, Dhruv Agarwal, Aditya Vashistha

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of moderating WhatsApp groups under end-to-end encryption by examining admins in India and Bangladesh through Baumrind's care and control framework. It combines 32 admin interviews with observations of 30 public groups and uses reflexive thematic analysis to identify four distinct moderation styles: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved. The study reveals how offline social ties and cultural context shape moderating decisions in private versus public groups and proposes design recommendations for WhatsApp, including targeted moderation tools, onboarding support, dashboards, and language-aware debunking resources. Collectively, the work challenges a one-size-fits-all approach to moderation on encrypted platforms and provides actionable guidance for building sociotechnical tools that respect local norms while safeguarding group safety.

Abstract

WhatsApp is the largest social media platform in the Global South and is a virulent force in global misinformation and political propaganda. Due to end-to-end encryption WhatsApp can barely review any content and mostly rely on volunteer moderation by group admins. Yet, little is known about how WhatsApp group admins manage their groups, what factors and values influence moderation decisions, and what challenges they face while managing their groups. To fill this gap, we interviewed admins of 32 diverse groups and reviewed content from 30 public groups in India and Bangladesh. We observed notable differences in the formation, members' behavior, and moderation of public versus private groups, as well as in how WhatsApp admins operate compared to those on other platforms. We used Baumrind's typology of 'parenting styles' as a lens to examine how admins enact care and control during volunteer moderation. We identified four styles based on how caring and controlling the admins are and discuss design recommendations to help them better manage problematic content in WhatsApp groups.

One Style Does Not Regulate All: Moderation Practices in Public and Private WhatsApp Groups

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of moderating WhatsApp groups under end-to-end encryption by examining admins in India and Bangladesh through Baumrind's care and control framework. It combines 32 admin interviews with observations of 30 public groups and uses reflexive thematic analysis to identify four distinct moderation styles: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved. The study reveals how offline social ties and cultural context shape moderating decisions in private versus public groups and proposes design recommendations for WhatsApp, including targeted moderation tools, onboarding support, dashboards, and language-aware debunking resources. Collectively, the work challenges a one-size-fits-all approach to moderation on encrypted platforms and provides actionable guidance for building sociotechnical tools that respect local norms while safeguarding group safety.

Abstract

WhatsApp is the largest social media platform in the Global South and is a virulent force in global misinformation and political propaganda. Due to end-to-end encryption WhatsApp can barely review any content and mostly rely on volunteer moderation by group admins. Yet, little is known about how WhatsApp group admins manage their groups, what factors and values influence moderation decisions, and what challenges they face while managing their groups. To fill this gap, we interviewed admins of 32 diverse groups and reviewed content from 30 public groups in India and Bangladesh. We observed notable differences in the formation, members' behavior, and moderation of public versus private groups, as well as in how WhatsApp admins operate compared to those on other platforms. We used Baumrind's typology of 'parenting styles' as a lens to examine how admins enact care and control during volunteer moderation. We identified four styles based on how caring and controlling the admins are and discuss design recommendations to help them better manage problematic content in WhatsApp groups.
Paper Structure (31 sections, 2 figures, 3 tables)

This paper contains 31 sections, 2 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Community Management and Volunteer Moderation
  4. Content Moderation on WhatsApp
  5. Care and Control in Content Moderation: Parenting Styles as a Lens
  6. Methods
  7. Demographics of WhatsApp Groups
  8. Findings
  9. Who Gets to Become Admins in WhatsApp Groups and What Roles Do They play?
  10. Becoming an Admin
  11. The Roles of Admins
  12. What Types of Problematic Content Affect WhatsApp Groups?
  13. Admins' Perceptions of Problematic Content
  14. User Reactions to Problematic Content
  15. How do Admins Respond to Problematic Content in WhatsApp Groups?
  16. ...and 16 more sections

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Four parenting styles according to Baumrind's typology.
  • Figure 2: (A) Group member deleted their message on fake cures of Cancer after a group member debunked it. (B) Admin removed both the spam message and the spammer and discouraged group members from sharing irrelevant messages. (C) Admin enabled admin-only messaging in a service related public group. [All messages have been paraphrased in English to protect user privacy.]