[Air-L] ‘Behind the Scenes’ online talk series, session 16: Emillie de Keulenaar on consensus-building moderation systems

[J.C. Vieira Magalhaes]

Dear all,

Next Tuesday (18th February), our ‘Behind the Scenes’ online talk series will host Emillie de Keulenaar (University of Groningen), who will discuss consensus-building content moderation, and how to study it. A truly important talk, especially in light of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's recent attempts to make this type of approach the default for platform fact-checking.

See the details below and register for free here: https://platform-governance.org/session-16-emillie-de-keulenaar-content-moderation-from-adjudication-to-consensus-building/ 

João, also on behalf of Christian and Paloma

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Time and Date: February 18, 3-4pm CEST

Content moderation from adjudication to consensus-building

Though content moderation has not disappeared under Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s new moderation philosophies, the transformations it has undergone remain unclear and inconsistent. In this talk, I want to delve deeper into a counter-intuitive development that has gathered less attention in journalistic and scholarly circles: the development of so-called “consensus-building” moderation mechanisms.

Though content moderation has visibly veered towards a normatively agnostic take in favour of freedom of expression, at the same time it has invested in systems that attempt to “crowdsource consensus” (via Community Notes), or “bridge divides” via a variety of “bridging systems” within ranking, recommenders and LLM applications.

While this development appears to pave a road for content moderation to contribute to “healthier” public debate, questions remain about (1) the role of public institutions in modelling “bridging systems” for private platforms with distinct financial and political interests; and (2) the underlying concepts that are baked into operationalisations of “consensus-building” in algorithmic systems.

In discussing this idea, I also point to empirical methods for analysing “consensus-building” moderation techniques as alternatives to suspension, demotion and flagging. This means using datasets provided by the platform itself — Community Notes datasets or other — as well as tracing the genesis and overall transformation that these techniques have undergone from application to application.

Presenting Author

Emillie de Keulenaar is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Open Intelligence Lab, and a research consultant for the UN DPPA Innovation Cell. Her research lies on the formation of speech norms in social media content moderation and their impact in the formation of online counter-spheres. With the UN DPPA Innovation Cell, she develops analytical software and research methods for monitoring public conflict and dialogue processes across the web.

About the Series 

This talk is part of the series Behind the Scenes – Conversations on Empirical Platform Governance Research that invites scholars in this field to share their experiences and views, fostering  community exchange about how we can study platform governance in this challenging context. It is hosted by the Lab “Platform Governance, Media, and Technology” (PGMT) at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI), University of Bremen, and the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen.



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João C. Magalhães
Assistant Professor in Media, Politics and Democracy
University of Groningen | Centre for Media and Journalism Studies
https://jcmagalhaes.com/

Selected publications: Musk reinvented platform power. We should take heed <https://www.techpolicy.press/musk-reinvented-platform-power-we-should-take-heed/>, 2024 (Tech Policy Press) | Governance by technological design, a critique <https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781800887206/book-part-9781800887206-32.xml>, 2024 (Handbook of Media and Communication Governance) | A history of objectionability in Twitter’s moderation practices <https://academic.oup.com/joc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/joc/jqad015/7204763?utm_source=authortollfreelink&utm_campaign=joc&utm_medium=email&guestAccessKey=fe630b65-d137-4378-bfb2-44026df942a7&login=false>, 2023 (Journal of Communication, w/ Emillie de Keulenaar, Bharath Ganesh) | Social media, social unfreedom <https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/commun-2022-0040/html>, 2022 (Communications, w/ Jun Yu) | Big Tech, data colonialism and the reconfiguration of social good <https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/15995>, 2021(International Journal of Communication, w/ Nick Couldry) | Algorithmic visibility and bottom-up authoritarianism in the Brazilian crisis <http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/4042/>, 2019 (PhD, LSE) | Considering algorithmic ethical subjectivation <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305118768301>, 2018 (Social Media + Society)