Power Echoes: Investigating Moderation Biases in Online Power-Asymmetric Conflicts
This addresses moderation fairness in online platforms for users and moderators, but it is incremental as it extends prior work on biases to a new scenario.
The study investigated biases in human moderation of online power-asymmetric conflicts, such as consumer-merchant disputes, and found biases favoring powerful parties, with AI assistance reducing most but amplifying some biases.
Online power-asymmetric conflicts are prevalent, and most platforms rely on human moderators to conduct moderation currently. Previous studies have been continuously focusing on investigating human moderation biases in different scenarios, while moderation biases under power-asymmetric conflicts remain unexplored. Therefore, we aim to investigate the types of power-related biases human moderators exhibit in power-asymmetric conflict moderation (RQ1) and further explore the influence of AI's suggestions on these biases (RQ2). For this goal, we conducted a mixed design experiment with 50 participants by leveraging the real conflicts between consumers and merchants as a scenario. Results suggest several biases towards supporting the powerful party within these two moderation modes. AI assistance alleviates most biases of human moderation, but also amplifies a few. Based on these results, we propose several insights into future research on human moderation and human-AI collaborative moderation systems for power-asymmetric conflicts.