A Blessing or a Curse? The Impact of Platform-initiated Comment Moderation on Subsequent Answer Generation on Social Media Platform
Files
Date
2025-01-07
Contributor
Advisor
Department
Instructor
Depositor
Speaker
Researcher
Consultant
Interviewer
Narrator
Transcriber
Annotator
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Volume
Number/Issue
Starting Page
3903
Ending Page
Alternative Title
Abstract
Social media moderation encompasses actions undertaken by platforms to uphold community norms. While existing literature predominantly examines the direct impact of moderation on reducing harmful behavior, limited attention has been given to its spillover effect on other content, particularly on unmoderated content. This study exploits a temporary shutdown of the commenting function on a large Q&A platform to investigate the spillover effect of comment moderation on the subsequent answer generation. Our analysis reveals that comment moderation induce a decrease in the volume of the subsequent answers, with an improved quality during and after the shutdown period. Our mechanism analyses show that, after comment moderation, contributors may become more conservative in providing new answers by writing more similar, specific, and longer content. In addition, comment moderation exerts a negative impact on the volume of the subsequent regular answers but has no significant effect on harmful answers, which provides supporting evidence for the plausibility of a chilling effect.
Description
Keywords
Crowd-based Platforms, chilling effect, differences-in differences., mechanism analyses, platform-initiated comment moderation, social media platform
Citation
Extent
10
Format
Geographic Location
Time Period
Related To
Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Related To (URI)
Table of Contents
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Rights Holder
Local Contexts
Collections
Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.