As content moderation becomes a central aspect of all social media platforms and online communities, interest has grown in how to make moderation decisions contestable. On social media platforms where individual communities moderate their own activities, the responsibility to address user appeals falls on volunteers from within the community. While there is a growing body of work devoted to understanding and supporting the volunteer moderators' workload, little is known about their practice of handling user appeals. Through a collaborative and iterative design process with Reddit moderators, we found that moderators spend considerable effort in investigating user ban appeals and desired to directly engage with users and retain their agency over each decision. To fulfill their needs, we designed and built AppealMod, a system that induces friction in the appeals process by asking users to provide additional information before their appeals are reviewed by human moderators. In addition to giving moderators more information, we expected the friction in the appeal process would lead to a selection effect among users, with many insincere and toxic appeals being abandoned before getting any attention from human moderators. To evaluate our system, we conducted a randomized field experiment in a Reddit community of over 29 million users that lasted for four months. As a result of the selection effect, moderators viewed only 30% of initial appeals and less than 10% of the toxically worded appeals; yet they granted roughly the same number of appeals when compared with the control group. Overall, our system is effective at reducing moderator workload and minimizing their exposure to toxic content while honoring their preference for direct engagement and agency in appeals.

翻译：随着内容审核成为所有社交媒体平台和在线社区的核心议题，如何使审核决策具有可争议性日益受到关注。在由独立社区自行管理活动的社交媒体平台上，处理用户申诉的责任落在社区内的志愿者身上。尽管已有大量研究致力于理解和减轻志愿者版主的工作负担，但关于他们处理用户申诉的具体实践仍鲜为人知。通过与Reddit版主的协作迭代式设计过程，我们发现版主在调查用户封禁申诉上投入了大量精力，并且希望直接与用户互动并保留对每项决策的自主权。为满足这些需求，我们设计并构建了AppealMod系统，该系统通过在申诉被人工版主审核前要求用户提供额外信息，在申诉过程中引入摩擦。除了为版主提供更多信息外，我们还预期申诉过程中的摩擦会产生用户选择效应——许多非真诚和恶意的申诉在获得人工版主关注前就会被放弃。为评估系统效果，我们在一个拥有超过2900万用户的Reddit社区中开展随机现场实验，持续四个月。受选择效应影响，版主仅查看了30%的初始申诉和不到10%的恶意申诉；但与对照组相比，他们批准的申诉数量大致相同。总体而言，我们的系统在减少版主工作负担、最小化其接触恶意内容风险的同时，尊重了版主在申诉处理中偏好直接互动和自主决策的需求。