Boundaries of Speech in the Community’s Eye: Understanding Crowdsourced Content Moderation on Social Media Platform

This study aims to investigate Weibo’s Community Council, a novel form of crowdsourced content moderation mechanism on one of the largest Chinese social media platforms. Weibo introduced the Community Council in 2021 to leverage the “wisdom of crowds” through qualified user volunteers who vote on post violations to restrict content access purposefully. However, it remains unclear whether this system legitimately and effectively regulates expression for public interest consideration. In this study, we collected 8,654 controversial posts that received votes from Community Council members. We will reveal the characteristics of the content deemed violative to delineate the boundary of speech in the community’s eyes via text mining approaches and regression analyses. Overall, the research seeks to shed light on this emerging strategy of surrogate censorship and illustrate the role of peer-based moderation strategies in the platforms.