Enhancing Legitimacy of Content Moderation

Abstract

Platforms are actively developing strategies to enhance the legitimacy of their content moderation and gain acceptance and trust across diverse user groups. This paper explores one such strategy, endorsed by the EU regulator, which involves proceduralizing content moderation, with a focus on copyright enforcement as a case study. However, the paper raises concerns regarding the efficacy of proceduralization in legitimizing content moderation, citing historical limitations in the adoption of dispute resolution mechanisms by ordinary users. In response, the paper suggests a complementary approach: integrating elements of procedural justice, based on users’ perceptions of fairness, into the implementation of content moderation requirements mandated by regulators. By elucidating how procedural justice enhances legitimacy and drawing from user experiences with content moderation, the paper proposes a preliminary index of procedural justice values to be used as a metric and guidance for putting regulatory requirements into practice.