Understanding international perceptions of the severity of harmful content online.

Jialun Aaron Jiang,Jed R Brubaker,Casey Fiesler,Morgan Klaus Scheuerman,Alexandre Bovet

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0256762

Abstract

Online social media platforms constantly struggle with harmful content such as misinformation and violence, but how to effectively moderate and prioritize such content for billions of global users with different backgrounds and values presents a challenge. Through an international survey with 1,696 internet users across 8 different countries across the world, this empirical study examines how international users perceive harmful content online and the similarities and differences in their perceptions. We found that across countries, the perceived severity consistently followed an exponential growth as the harmful content became more severe, but what harmful content were perceived as more or less severe varied significantly. Our results challenge platform content moderation’s status quo of using a one-size-fits-all approach to govern international users, and provide guidance on how platforms may wish to prioritize and customize their moderation of harmful content.

Highlights

It is no secret that social media platforms have been plagued with harmful content—issues like misinformation and the incitement of violence
We found that each country cluster had a unique set of harmful content that they collectively perceived as more severe or less severe, and these sets rarely overlap between clusters
Our findings show significant differences in perceptions of harmful content across different countries in the world

Summary

Introduction

It is no secret that social media platforms have been plagued with harmful content—issues like misinformation and the incitement of violence. Take Facebook, currently one of the largest social media platforms, which has 2.7 billion monthly active users worldwide and supports 111 languages. Despite its size, it has about 15,000 moderators [2] compared to billions of its users. Like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, have become a central part of the social lives of billions of people across the world While these platforms are not by themselves content producers, they are responsible for storing, organizing, and circulating a massive amount of user-generated content [5, 8]. Jackson et al have called for deeply integrating the role of policy into research, pointing out that policy is deeply intertwined with design and practice [11]

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