research-article

CivilServant: Community-Led Experiments in Platform Governance

Authors:

J. Nathan Matias,

Merry MouAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Paper No.: 9, Pages 1 - 13

https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173583

Published: 19 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

As online platforms monitor and intervene in the daily lives of billions of people, platforms are being used to govern enduring social problems. Field experiments could inform wise uses of this power if tensions between democratic values and experimentation could be resolved. In this paper, we introduce CivilServant, a novel experimentation infrastructure that online communities and their moderators use to evaluate policies and replicate each others' findings. We situate CivilServant in the political history of policy experiments and present design considerations for community participation, ethics, and replication. Based on two case studies of community-led experiments and public debriefings on the reddit platform, we share findings on community deliberation about experiment results. We also report on uses of evidence, finding that experiments informed moderator practices, community policies, and replications by communities and platforms. We discuss the implications of these findings for evaluating platform governance in an open, democratic, experimenting society.

References

[1]

Adelman, C. Kurt Lewin and the origins of action research. Educational action research 1, 1 (1993), 7--24.

[2]

Arnstein, S. R. A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of planners 35, 4 (1969), 216--224.

[3]

Bakshy, E., Eckles, D., and Bernstein, M. S. Designing and Deploying Online Field Experiments. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW '14, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2014), 283--292.

Digital Library

[4]

Banet-Weiser, S., and Miltner, K. M. # MasculinitySoFragile: culture, structure, and networked misogyny. Feminist Media Studies 16, 1 (2016), 171--174.

[5]

Barthel, M., Stocking, G., Holcomb, J., and Mitchell, A. Reddit news users more likely to be male, young and digital in their news preferences. Tech. rep., Pew Research Center, Feb. 2016.

[6]

boyd, d. Untangling research and practice: What Facebooks emotional contagion study teaches us. Research Ethics 12, 1 (2016), 4--13.

[7]

Bruckman, A., Curtis, P., Figallo, C., and Laurel, B. Approaches to managing deviant behavior in virtual communities. In CHI Conference Companion (1994), 183--184.

Digital Library

[8]

Buni, C. The secret rules of the internet, Apr. 2016.

[9]

Campbell, D. T. Comment: Another perspective on a scholarly career. Scientific inquiry and the social sciences (1981), 453--501.

[10]

Campbell, D. T. The experimenting society. In The experimenting society: Essays in honor of Donald T. Campbell. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1998, 35.

[11]

Campbell, D. T., and Stanley, J. C. Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research, 1 ed. Wadsworth Publishing, 1963.

[12]

Centivany, A., and Glushko, B. Popcorn Tastes Good: Participatory Policymaking and Reddit's. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2016), 1126--1137.

Digital Library

[13]

Chan, M. ADL Tackles Hate Speech With Silicon Valley Command Center | Time.com. Time Magazine (Mar. 2017).

[14]

Chancellor, S., Pater, J. A., Clear, T., Gilbert, E., and De Choudhury, M. # thyghgapp: Instagram Content Moderation and Lexical Variation in Pro-Eating Disorder Communities. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, ACM (2016), 1201--1213.

Digital Library

[15]

Cheng, J., Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., and Leskovec, J. How Community Feedback Shapes User Behavior. ICWSM 2014 (May 2014). arXiv: 1405.1429.

[16]

Citron, D., and Wittes, B. Follow Buddies and Block Buddies: A Simple Proposal to Improve Civility, Control, and Privacy on Twitter, Jan. 2017.

[17]

Citron, D. K., and Norton, H. L. Intermediaries and hate speech: Fostering digital citizenship for our information age. Boston University Law Review 91 (2011), 1435.

[18]

Contandriopoulos, D., Lemire, M., Denis, J.-L., and Tremblay,. Knowledge Exchange Processes in Organizations and Policy Arenas: A Narrative Systematic Review of the Literature. Milbank Quarterly 88, 4 (Dec. 2010), 444--483.

[19]

Cousins, J. B., and Whitmore, E. Framing participatory evaluation. New directions for evaluation 1998, 80 (1998), 5--23.

[20]

Desposato, S. Ethical Challenges and Some Solutions for Field Experiments.

[21]

Desposato, S. Ethics and Experiments: Problems and Solutions for Social Scientists and Policy Professionals. Routledge, 2015.

[22]

Dimond, J. P., Dye, M., Larose, D., and Bruckman, A. S. Hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, ACM (2013), 477--490.

Digital Library

[23]

Doleac, J. L., and Stein, L. C. The visible hand: Race and online market outcomes. The Economic Journal 123, 572 (2013), F469--F492.

[24]

Edelman, B. G., Luca, M., and Svirsky, D. Racial discrimination in the sharing economy: Evidence from a field experiment.

[25]

Fabijan, A., Dmitriev, P., Olsson, H. H., and Bosch, J. The Evolution of Continuous Experimentation in Software Product Development. In International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (2017).

Digital Library

[26]

Facebook. Group Admin Basics: What is a Group Admin?

[27]

Fiesler, C., Chancellor, S., Hoffmann, A. L., Pater, J., and Proferes, N. J. Challenges and Futures for Ethical Social Media Research. In AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM): Workshop (2016).

[28]

Forte, A., Larco, V., and Bruckman, A. Decentralization in Wikipedia governance. Journal of Management Information Systems 26, 1 (2009), 49--72.

Digital Library

[29]

Geiger, R. S. Successor Systems: The Role Of Reflexive Algorithms In Enacting Ideological Critique. Selected Papers of Internet Research 4 (2014).

[30]

Geiger, R. S. Bot-based collective blocklists in Twitter: the counterpublic moderation of harassment in a networked public space. Information, Communication & Society 19, 6 (June 2016), 787--803.

[31]

Geiger, S. Does facebook have civil servants? On governmentality and computational social science. In Workshop on Ethics for Studying Sociotechnical Systems in a Big Data World (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2015).

[32]

Gerber, A. S., and Green, D. P. Field experiments: Design, analysis, and interpretation. WW Norton, 2012.

[33]

Gillespie, T. The politics of platforms. New Media & Society 12, 3 (2010), 347--364.

[34]

Good, O. Does Your Gamertag Have Herpes? Beware Xbox Live Enforcement United. Kotaku (Aug. 2013).

[35]

Grimmelmann, J. The law and ethics of experiments on social media users.

[36]

Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., and Riedl, J. The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedias reaction to popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist (2012), 0002764212469365.

[37]

Hayes, G. R. The relationship of action research to human-computer interaction. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 18, 3 (2011), 15.

Digital Library

[38]

Hill, B. M., and Shaw, A. Studying Populations of Online Communities. In The Handbook of Networked Communication. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2017.

[39]

Hue, T. How to create an effective Comment Policy that readers actually follow, Aug. 2017.

[40]

Irani, L., and Silberman, M. From critical design to critical infrastructure: Lessons from Turkopticon. interactions 21, 4 (2014), 32--35.

Digital Library

[41]

Irani, L. C., and Silberman, M. Turkopticon: Interrupting worker invisibility in amazon mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2013), 611--620.

Digital Library

[42]

Johnson, L. B. 296 - Memorandum on the Use and Management of Computers by Federal Agencies, June 1966.

[43]

Keegan, B. C., and Matias, J. N. Actually, It's About Ethics in Computational Social Science: A Multi-party Risk-Benefit Framework for Online Community Research. arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06578 (2015).

[44]

Kevic, K., Murphy, B., Williams, L., and Beckmann, J. Characterizing experimentation in continuous deployment: a case study on bing. In Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice Track, IEEE Press (2017), 123--132.

Digital Library

[45]

Kiene, C., Monroy-Hernndez, A., and Hill, B. M. Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '16, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2016), 1152--1156.

Digital Library

[46]

Kohavi, R., Deng, A., Frasca, B., Walker, T., Xu, Y., and Pohlmann, N. Online Controlled Experiments at Large Scale. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD '13, ACM (New York, NY, USA, 2013), 1168--1176.

Digital Library

[47]

Lin, W., and Green, D. P. Standard operating procedures: A safety net for pre-analysis plans. PS: Political Science & Politics 49, 3 (2016), 495--500.

[48]

Lita, L. Meet Wasabi, an Open Source A/B Testing Platform, Jan. 2017.

[49]

Lomas, N. Twitter nixed 635k+ terrorism accounts between mid-2015 and end of 2016. TechCrunch (Mar. 2017).

[50]

MacKinnon, R. Consent of the networked: The worldwide struggle for Internet freedom. Politique trangre 50, 2 (2012).

Digital Library

[51]

Matias, J. N. The Civic Labor of Online Moderators (Oxford, UK, Sept. 2016).

[52]

Matias, J. N. Going Dark: Social Factors in Collective Action Against Platform Operators in the Reddit Blackout. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2016), 1138--1151.

Digital Library

[53]

Matias, J. N. Posting Rules in Online Discussions Prevents Problems & Increases Participation, Oct. 2016.

[54]

Matias, J. N. A toxic web: what the Victorians can teach us about online abuse. The Guardian (Apr. 2016).

[55]

Matias, J. N. Persuading Algorithms With an AI Nudge, Feb. 2017.

[56]

Matias, J. N., Johnson, A., Boesel, W. E., Keegan, B., Friedman, J., and DeTar, C. Reporting, Reviewing, and Responding to Harassment on Twitter. arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.03359 (2015).

[57]

Metz, R. Facebook Lives new suicide-prevention tools come with good intentions but many questions. MIT Technology Review (Mar. 2017).

[58]

Meyer, M. N. Two Cheers for Corporate Experimentation: The A/B Illusion and the Virtues of Data-Driven Innovation. SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2605132, Social Science Research Network, Rochester, NY, May 2015.

[59]

Nosek, B. A., Alter, G., Banks, G. C., Borsboom, D., Bowman, S. D., Breckler, S. J., Buck, S., Chambers, C. D., Chin, G., Christensen, G., and others. Promoting an open research culture. Science 348, 6242 (2015), 1422--1425.

[60]

Oakley, A. Experiments in knowing: Gender and method in the social sciences.

[61]

O'Donovan, C. Nextdoor Rolls Out Product Fix It Hopes Will Stem Racial Profiling. BuzzFeed (Aug. 2016).

[62]

Paluck, E. L., and Cialdini, R. B. Field research methods. Handbook of research methods in social and personality psychology (2014), 81--97.

[63]

Parks, J. Scaling Airbnbs Experimentation Platform, May 2017.

[64]

Pettingill, L. M. 4 Principles for Making Experimentation Count, Mar. 2017.

[65]

Popper, K. The open society and its enemies. Routledge, 1947.

[66]

Postigo, H. America Online volunteers. International Journal of Cultural Studies 12, 5 (Sept. 2009), 451--469.

[67]

Rheingold, H. The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. MIT press, 1993.

Digital Library

[68]

Roberts, S. T. Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers' Dirty Work.

[69]

Rosenblat, A., and Stark, L. Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Ubers Drivers. SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 2686227, Social Science Research Network, Rochester, NY, July 2016.

[70]

Sandvig, C., Hamilton, K., Karahalios, K., and Langbort, C. Auditing algorithms: Research methods for detecting discrimination on internet platforms. Data and discrimination: converting critical concerns into productive inquiry (2014).

[71]

Scheiber, N. How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers Buttons. The New York Times (Apr. 2017).

[72]

Seltzer, W. Free speech unmoored in copyright's safe harbor: Chilling effects of the DMCA on the first amendment. Harv. JL & Tech. 24 (2010), 171.

[73]

Sunstein, C. R. Republic. com 2.0. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Digital Library

[74]

Thakor, M., and others. Networked trafficking: reflections on technology and the anti-trafficking movement. Dialectical Anthropology 37, 2 (2013), 277--290.

[75]

Thakor, M. N. Algorithmic detectives against child trafficking: data, entrapment, and the new global policing network. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016.

[76]

Vitak, J., Shilton, K., and Ashktorab, Z. Beyond the belmont principles: Ethical challenges, practices, and beliefs in the online data research community. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, ACM (2016), 941--953.

Digital Library

[77]

Wark, L. Inside Alphabets Jigsaw, the powerful tech incubator that could reshape geopolitics. Quartz (Nov. 2016).

[78]

Weiss, C. H. Research for policy's sake: The enlightenment function of social research. Policy analysis (1977), 531--545.

[79]

Weiss, C. H. The many meanings of research utilization. Public administration review 39, 5 (1979), 426--431.

[80]

Xu, Y., Chen, N., Fernandez, A., Sinno, O., and Bhasin, A. From infrastructure to culture: A/b testing challenges in large scale social networks. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, ACM (2015), 2227--2236.

Digital Library

Cited By

Kimura EIstania RAfrimadona Imawan RRamadhan D(2024)Authoritarian Nostalgia and Democratic Decline in Contemporary IndonesiaJournal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs10.1177/1868103424125245243:3(387-408)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/18681034241252452
Islam MRichardson DSaha MVarghese DBartindale TSaha PSaputra MOlivier P(2024)Recordkeeping in Voice-based Remote Community EngagementProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642779(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642779
Khadpe PLe LNowak KIqbal SSuh J(2024)DISCERN: Designing Decision Support Interfaces to Investigate the Complexities of Workplace Social Decision-Making With Line ManagersProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642685(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642685
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

CivilServant: Community-Led Experiments in Platform Governance
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Computing / technology policy

Recommendations

PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities
UIST '20: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

The software behind online community platforms encodes a governance model that represents a strikingly narrow set of governance possibilities focused on moderators and administrators. When online communities desire other forms of government, such as ...
Volunteer Work: Mapping the Future of Moderation Research
CSCW '19 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2019 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing

Research on the governance of online communities often requires exchanges and interactions between researchers and moderators. While a growing body of work has studied commercial content moderation in the context of platform governance and policy ...
"How Do You Quantify How Racist Something Is?": Color-Blind Moderation in Decentralized Governance
CSCW

Volunteer moderators serve as gatekeepers for problematic content, such as racism and other forms of hate speech, on digital platforms. Prior studies have reported volunteer moderators' diverse roles in different governance models, highlighting the ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2018

8489 pages

ISBN:9781450356206

DOI:10.1145/3173574

General Chairs:
Regan Mandryk
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
,
Mark Hancock
University of Waterloo, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Mark Perry
Brunel University London, UK
,
Anna Cox
University College London, UK

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 April 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI '18

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '18: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 21 - 26, 2018

Montreal QC, Canada

Acceptance Rates

CHI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 666 of 2,590 submissions, 26%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI '25

Sponsor:
sigchi

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

47
Total Citations
View Citations
976
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)103
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)15

Reflects downloads up to 22 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Kimura EIstania RAfrimadona Imawan RRamadhan D(2024)Authoritarian Nostalgia and Democratic Decline in Contemporary IndonesiaJournal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs10.1177/1868103424125245243:3(387-408)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/18681034241252452
Islam MRichardson DSaha MVarghese DBartindale TSaha PSaputra MOlivier P(2024)Recordkeeping in Voice-based Remote Community EngagementProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642779(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642779
Khadpe PLe LNowak KIqbal SSuh J(2024)DISCERN: Designing Decision Support Interfaces to Investigate the Complexities of Workplace Social Decision-Making With Line ManagersProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642685(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642685
Jhaver SFrey SZhang A(2023)Decentralizing Platform Power: A Design Space of Multi-Level Governance in Online Social PlatformsSocial Media + Society10.1177/205630512312078579:4Online publication date: 2-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231207857
Zong JMatias J(2023)Data Refusal from Below: A Framework for Understanding, Evaluating, and Envisioning Refusal as DesignACM Journal on Responsible Computing10.1145/36301071:1(1-23)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630107
Koshy VBajpai TChandrasekharan ESundaram HKarahalios K(2023)Measuring User-Moderator Alignment on r/ChangeMyViewProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100777:CSCW2(1-36)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610077
Kuo THernani AGrossklags J(2023)The Unsung Heroes of Facebook Groups Moderation: A Case Study of Moderation Practices and ToolsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35795307:CSCW1(1-38)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579530
Yen RFeng LMehra BPang CHu SLu Z(2023)StoryChat: Designing a Narrative-Based Viewer Participation Tool for Live Streaming ChatroomsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580912(1-18)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580912
Papakyriakopoulos OEngelmann SWinecoff A(2023)Upvotes? Downvotes? No Votes? Understanding the relationship between reaction mechanisms and political discourse on RedditProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580644(1-28)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580644
Jiang JNie PBrubaker JFiesler C(2023)A Trade-off-centered Framework of Content ModerationACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/353492930:1(1-34)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3534929
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents