Whose Judgments Count? Representation Gaps in Crowdsourced Content Moderation Produce Unequal Protection from Perceived Toxicity
Content moderation is a central form of digital governance, yet people disagree over what content should be removed from shared online spaces. While platforms aggregate human judgments to build moderation systems, it remains unclear how this process shapes which users are protected from content they perceive as toxic. We address this gap by combining large-scale judgment data with counterfactual simulations that trace how the demographic composition of moderator pools shapes the distribution of protection across users. Applying this framework to removal judgments from 16,221 U.S. respondents evaluating 102,463 comments from Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan, we find demographic heterogeneities i...
| Authors | Zhaodi Chen, Byungkyu Lee |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SI |
| Published | 5 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 August 2026 |
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