Shagun Jhaver

Shagun Jhaver, Quan Ze Chen, Detlef Knauss et al.

Online social platforms centered around content creators often allow comments on content, where creators moderate the comments they receive. As creators can face overwhelming numbers of comments, with some of them harassing or hateful, platforms typically provide tools such as word filters for creators to automate aspects of moderation. From needfinding interviews with 19 creators about how they use existing tools, we found that they struggled with writing good filters as well as organizing and revisiting their filters, due to the difficulty of determining what the filters actually catch. To address these issues, we present FilterBuddy, a system that supports creators in authoring new filters or building from existing filter lists, as well as organizing their filters and visualizing what comments are captured over time. We conducted an early-stage evaluation of FilterBuddy with YouTube creators, finding that participants see FilterBuddy not just as a moderation tool, but also a means to organize their comments to better understand their audiences.

Shagun Jhaver, Seth Frey, Amy Zhang

Many have criticized the centralized and unaccountable governance of prominent online social platforms, leading to renewed interest in platform governance that incorporates multiple centers of power. Decentralization of power can arise horizontally, through parallel communities, each with local administration, and vertically, through multiple hierarchies of overlapping jurisdiction. Drawing from literature on federalism and polycentricity in analogous offline institutions, we scrutinize the landscape of existing platforms through the lens of multi-level governance. Our analysis describes how online platforms incorporate varying forms and degrees of decentralized governance. In particular, we propose a framework that characterizes the general design space and the various ways that middle levels of governance vary in how they can interact with a centralized governance system above and end users below. This focus provides a starting point for new lines of inquiry between platform- and community-governance scholarship. By engaging themes of decentralization, hierarchy, power, and responsibility, while discussing concrete examples, we connect designers and theorists of online spaces.

Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Shagun Jhaver, Amy Bruckman et al.

Should social media platforms override a community's self-policing when it repeatedly break rules? What actions can they consider? In light of this debate, platforms have begun experimenting with softer alternatives to outright bans. We examine one such intervention called quarantining, that impedes direct access to and promotion of controversial communities. Specifically, we present two case studies of what happened when Reddit quarantined the influential communities r/TheRedPill (TRP) and r/The_Donald (TD). Using over 85M Reddit posts, we apply causal inference methods to examine the quarantine's effects on TRP and TD. We find that the quarantine made it more difficult to recruit new members: new user influx to TRP and TD decreased by 79.5% and 58%, respectively. Despite quarantining, existing users' misogyny and racism levels remained unaffected. We conclude by reflecting on the effectiveness of this design friction in limiting the influence of toxic communities and discuss broader implications for content moderation.