Content Moderation Justice and Fairness on Social Media: Comparisons Across Different Contexts and Platforms

TL;DR

The paper investigates how users perceive justice and fairness in content moderation across platform types (commercial vs user-moderated), content legality (illegal vs legal), and moderation styles (restorative vs retributive) using an online experiment with 200 US participants on Reddit and Twitter. It employs a mixed design to measure perceived justice and fairness per scenario, revealing that retributive moderation yields higher justice on commercially moderated platforms for illegal content, while restorative moderation enhances fairness for legal content; explanations influence perceptions in certain illegal contexts. The findings contribute a nuanced view that both moderation paradigms can improve outcomes depending on violation type, informing platform policymaking and governance strategies for moderation design and transparency. The work highlights practical implications for balancing safety, rights, and community health in multi-platform ecosystems while outlining avenues for future cross-cultural validation and scale development.

Abstract

Social media users may perceive moderation decisions by the platform differently, which can lead to frustration and dropout. This study investigates users' perceived justice and fairness of online moderation decisions when they are exposed to various illegal versus legal scenarios, retributive versus restorative moderation strategies, and user-moderated versus commercially moderated platforms. We conduct an online experiment on 200 American social media users of Reddit and Twitter. Results show that retributive moderation delivers higher justice and fairness for commercially moderated than for user-moderated platforms in illegal violations; restorative moderation delivers higher fairness for legal violations than illegal ones. We discuss the opportunities for platform policymaking to improve moderation system design.

Figures (2)

• Figure 1: Interaction between scenarios and groups regarding perceived justice and fairness.
• Figure 2: Experimental design process.