SIS Talk Sarah Ann Gilbert

Please join us for a talk from the second of our Faculty recruitment candidates. 

Governing the internet: The labour of moderating r/AskHistorians

Online communities provide spaces to discuss topics of interest, share and learn new information, and support the development of close, personal relationships. However, they also enable the propagation of anti-social behaviours, like trolling, harassment, and spreading disinformation and bigotry. Information and community governance serve to combat these problems, and at the community level, this is often conducted by volunteer moderators. Despite their important role in online communities, little is known about the work conducted by volunteer moderators, how this work is impacted by platform design and culture, and the broader impact of this work on communities. In this talk, I discuss the labour of volunteer moderation through a case study of the Reddit-based community, r/ AskHistorians and show how community governance can be leveraged to make online spaces healthier. Due to its unique rules and norms, r/AskHistorians provides an interesting opportunity to explore the impact of moderation work. While r/AskHistorians provides users with opportunities to learn about history, it’s location on Reddit presents challenges for the community’s volunteer moderators. Reddit's default masculine white demographic, and visible moderation practices that are interpreted as censorship, mean that r/AskHistorians is a focal point of disruptive behavior, stemming from a gap in empathy between users and moderators, and between users and historical subjects. Nonetheless, by leveraging a volunteer governance structure informed by trust in academic processes, r/AskHistorians moderators have carved out a space on Reddit where their rules and governance provide learning opportunities for users that close empathy gaps and teach historical practices. More broadly, my work shows that governance practices, such as those enacted by r/AskHistorians moderators, can serve as a model for combating problems faced by online communities, such as disinformation and bigotry, and demonstrates positive impacts of community governance. This talk contains references to hate speech, violent speech, and sexual violence