Exploring Crowdsourced Content Moderation Through Lens of Reddit during COVID-19

ABSTRACT

In 2020, when COVID-19 struck, social media gained even more influence in people's lives due to increased online activity. This event led to a surge of false information and cyberbullying, making content moderation harder than ever. Given this challenge, exploring opportunities to explore content moderation solutions to reduce hate speech and fake news on social media is vital. In this paper, we examine if existing content moderation systems are enough during global pandemics and, if not, where gaps may lie. Due to its intriguing Decentralized Content Management System (DCMS), we chose Reddit as the key social networking platform for our hypothesis testing. We used 1.8 million Reddit posts from COVID-19-related subreddits from January 2020 to April 2021. Our findings reveal several significant trends regarding the effect of a worldwide event on content moderation methods designed to lessen the prevalence of hazardous content and fake news. In light of these considerations, we provide the results of comprehensive research conducted with particular attention paid to the user-generated material and the DCMS of Reddit. © 2022 ACM.