Each of those pages is image driven, and each has millions of followers posting far more content than anyone could be reasonably asked to sift through. Robert Peck, a moderator for the large subreddits r/pics and r/aww, knows this all too well. Jhaver says this frustrates users, who then have to go back and ask moderators to reinstate the post.Īnd in a social-media world where troubling content increasingly consists of offensive memes, live-streams of shootings, or other visual, textless content, AutoMod’s reliance on finding keywords is a big liability. Such posts would get flagged because of the offensive language, even though discussing that language is the point of the post in the first place. That comes out to about 17.4 million posts in that time period.īut let’s say the word is important for context in the post-a discussion in 2016 of soon-to-be-president Donald Trump’s infamous comment about grabbing a woman’s genitals, for example. As Jhaver and his colleagues note, about 22% of all submissions on Reddit between March and October of 2018 were removed. It can send notifications to posters about problematic content, which Jhaver says is “educational,” in that authors can learn what was wrong with whatever they posted. On the one hand, automoderators are very good at what they do-if they’re programmed to find swear words, they will find and block posts that contain them without fail. Whether AutoMod is actually a time-saver is questionable, though. It’s since gone into wide use-Reddit adopted it sitewide in 2015, and the hugely popular game-streaming platforms Twitch and Discord followed suit soon after. Developed by Redditor Chad Birch as a way to augment his ability to moderate the r/gaming channel, AutoMod is a rule-based tool for identifying words that violate a certain page’s posting policies. Often working on contract, at minimum wage with few benefits, moderators can find themselves pulling long hours while being pummeled with content that takes a serious toll on their mental health.Īutomoderators are an attempt to mitigate the tedium and negative effects of such work. Social-media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have long relied on human moderators to manually comb through content and remove violent and offensive material that ranges from racist and sexist hate speech to graphic video of mass shootings.
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