Conceptualizing and Rethinking the Design of Cross-platform Creator Moderation

1 RESEARCH SITUATION

I am a third-year, full-time Ph.D. candidate in the Informatics program at The Pennsylvania State University's College of Information Sciences and Technology, where I am advised by Dr. Yubo Kou. The projected completion date of my doctoral degree will be around May 2024 or summer 2024. I have never attended a doctoral consortium at any previous SIGCHI conferences in the past. The themes of my research are HCI, CSCW, and, specifically, creator moderation.

2 CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION

Recent years have witnessed the growth of “creator economy,” where independent content creators rely on platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok to gain fanbase and income and further develop content creation as a profession. As 50 million people identify themselves as creators [12] and two million have made content creation their full-time job [17], creators usually want to establish their branding [13,32,38] that can be competitive and distinguishable from other creators [20] to sustain their careers [11]. Against this context, it is common that creators work across platforms to diversify their income and content creation [17,36].

But being creators does not mean absolute freedom of content creation, and monetizing content does not indicate secure self-employment. That is because creators need would go through creator moderation [29,30], where multiple governance mechanisms exercise control beyond creator's content or speech to their careers such as income [7], visibility [6], and audience engagement. And oftentimes, creator moderation negatively impacts creators. For example, creators complained that Facebook cut their income compared to the amount they had typically earned from videos [8]; and creators with racial and sexual minority groups complained their advertising income was unfairly reduced on YouTube compared with other creators [1,2,34].

However, as HCI and CSCW researchers have gained more understanding of users’ experience with content moderation (e.g., [9,19,22,23]), we still lack systematic knowledge of creators’ experiences with creator moderation. For example, researchers have uncovered various challenges users encounter when they experience content moderation: (1) opacity of moderation decision-making [15,18,35], (2) unfairness of moderation decisions [22,40,41], (3) procedural obstacles to appeal moderation decisions [5,25], and more. But will creators also encounter similar challenges of creator moderation systems? If so, how do they react to or handle these challenges?

Especially, as more creators nowadays work on more than one platform, relatively little work has paid attention to whether and how current moderation designs work with creators across platforms. Aiming for end-user advocacy and empowerment, HCI and CSCW researchers have started to design fairer, more transparent, and contestable moderation mechanisms (e.g., [14,24,41,43]). But it remains unknown whether and how those design structures fit creators’ interests or workflows across platforms. Communication researchers have touched on cross-platform creators in terms of how their labor for branding is shaped by certain platform affordances [13,27,32,38]. But still, from a design perspective, it has not fully understood whether and how those designs, including creator moderation, take creators’ interests and voice into account across platforms.

So, informed by prior work from different disciplines, my doctoral research aims to answer three primary research questions:

RQ1: What does creator moderation entail?

RQ2: How do creators experience creator moderation?

RQ3: What creator moderation design can better work with creators across platforms?

3 WORK TO DATE

My work is on the way but yet to fully answer all RQs. Specifically, with four completed publications [28–31], I have conducted a series of case studies on YouTube first to gain an initial understanding of creator moderation because YouTube is currently the largest video sharing platform and among the first to allow users to monetize their content [21]. Then, I plan to conduct two more studies to better conceptualize creator moderation and its design across platforms, such as YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok, as media outlets have reported the scale of creators is larger on these four than others in the US till 2022 [17,26,37]. In the following two subsections, I will detail how my published work and proposed studies address the research questions sequentially.

4 FUTURE DISSERTATION WORK

In my future work, I will map the conceptual understanding of creator moderation I gained from my prior work into understanding how moderation design can empower creators across platforms (i.e., who self-identifies to work at least on two platforms). Study 4 and 5 aim to fully answer RQ1-RQ3.

5 CURRENT AND EXPECTED CONTRIBUTIONS

My doctoral research aims to offer two primary contributions to the HCI and CSCW fields. First, my research contributes the conceptualization and notion of creator moderation and how it is contextualized across different platforms. Second, as HCI research values end-user advocacy, my research contributes design and policy implications that detail how to advocate and empower content creators in cross-platform creator moderation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work is partially supported by NSF grant no. 2006854. I am grateful for 49 content creators who have already participated in our work and shared their stories with us. Last, I sincerely thank my advisor, Dr. Yubo Kou, for his generous guidance and tremendous support.