Language Disparities in Moderation Workforce Allocation by Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms operate globally, yet whether they invest adequately in content moderation to protect users across languages remains unclear. Leveraging newly mandated transparency data under the European Union’s Digital Services Act, we uncover substantial cross-lingual disparities in moderation workforce allocation across platforms, both in language coverage and the number of moderators relative to the volume of user-generated content in each language. While larger platforms such as YouTube and Meta have moderators in many languages, we find that millions of EU-based users on smaller platforms, including Twitter/X, post in languages without any human oversight. Even when languages have at least one moderator, moderator allocation varies widely and disproportionately to content volume, with Twitter/X mainly prioritizing English while YouTube invests proportionally more in other European languages. Across platforms, languages primarily spoken in the ‘Global South’—such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic—consistently receive proportionally fewer moderators than English, ranging from an average of 55% of English’s allocation on YouTube to only 7.5% on Twitter/X. These findings highlight the need for more meaningful and globally inclusive transparency in platform moderation, to ensure that social media users everywhere receive equitable protection from online harms.