Unveiling Strategic Governance and User Dynamics in Weibo's Community-driven Content Moderation System

Social media companies continuously experiment with various platform governance models to tackle content moderation challenges, which calls for a comprehensive and empirical understanding of how a content moderation system evolves over the long term. Our study aims to fill this gap through a quantitative and qualitative study of Weibo's community-driven content moderation system, leveraging eleven million public moderation cases and decision data from 2012 to 2021. Based on reporting activities, platform decisions, and jury actions, we investigated the motivations and behavior patterns of three important actors in this governance model: reporting users, the platform, and user jurors. We suggest that users who frequently reported content and initiated the community-driven content moderation process tend to exhibit patterns of voluntarily policing the community or abusing others, sometimes coordinately, and were also treated differently by the platform. We indicate that Weibo's strategic moderation decisions have significantly distinctive preferences over cases from various topic categories and different levels of harmfulness, and the cases involving socially sensitive issues were given more consideration and penalized more severely than common misbehaviors. We also explore how the platform leveraged the usually one-sided votes of digital jurors to endorse its final decisions and find that the reason notes given by crowdsourced jurors also revealed a serious issue of decaying motivation. Our findings offer important insights into the coordination between a social media platform and its volunteer moderators to moderate an online community and address the question of how an autonomic platform governance model can prevail or perish.