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The Authority to Moderate: Social Media Moderation and its Limits

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Abstract

The negative impacts of social media have given rise to philosophical questions around whether social media companies have the authority to regulate user-generated content on their platforms. The most popular justification for that authority is to appeal to private ownership rights. Social media companies own their platforms, and their ownership comes with various rights that ground their authority to moderate user-generated content on their platforms. However, we argue that ownership rights can be limited when their exercise results in significant harms to others or the perpetration of injustices. We outline some of the substantive harms that social media platforms inflict through their practices of content moderation and some of the procedural injustices that arise through their arbitrary application of community guidelines. This provides a normative basis for calls to better regulate user-generated content on social media platforms. We conclude by considering some of the political and legal implications of our argument.

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Notes

  1. The term “censorship” has recently been co-opted by the American right and is now used to push back against the left’s socially progressive agenda, which the right unfavourably views as an attack on users’ speech rights online (Srinivasan, 2023). We use the term “censorship”, not in this way, but in the specific technical sense defined above that is common in the academic literature.

  2. Many moral issues regarding the exploitation of content moderation workers arise (see Roberts, 2019; and Barnes, 2022). It is also worth mentioning that some platforms, such as Reddit, give their users the authority to moderate content on forums (also called subreddits). These volunteer moderators are estimated to provide Reddit with $3.4 million worth of unpaid labour annually (Stokel-Walker, 2022), leading to demands for payment.

  3. The social media platform Gab may be an exception to this observation (see Stanford Internet Observatory, 2022).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Bhanuraj Kashyap & Paul Formosa

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Kashyap, B., Formosa, P. The Authority to Moderate: Social Media Moderation and its Limits. Philos. Technol. 36, 78 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-023-00685-w

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