Social media platforms struggling to tackle the tide of misinformation and unsuitable content could cut its聽flow by a fifth by better explaining their rules. That is the聽finding of a large-scale study of聽32 million posts on popular discussion site Reddit.
On Reddit, volunteer moderators clear forums, called subreddits, of聽unsuitable or off-topic material. Moderators take different approaches, however. Some explain why they have removed the content, but about 99 per cent simply take it down without explanation.
Shagun Jhaver at the Georgia Institute of Technology and his colleagues have found that those who have had their posts removed 鈥� with or without explanation 鈥� are less likely to continue posting. But those who aren鈥檛 provided with a reason why their content was taken down have a higher likelihood of further posts being removed than those who are given an explanation.
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Another study by the team found that 37 per cent of Reddit users surveyed didn鈥檛 understand why their post was removed, and 29 per cent felt frustrated that it had been.
The group calculated that if all post removals were accompanied with an explanation, the odds of future removals would drop by 20.8聽per cent. The team will present the work at the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing in Texas聽in November.
While the system works in small communities, it may be hard to scale across a larger site such as YouTube, which has been criticised for its opaque rules on what is acceptable content.
鈥淢oderators have to be careful about how they articulate their policies,鈥� says Kat Lo at the University of California, Irvine. 鈥淚t聽has to be able to move between many different types of context.鈥�
