The proliferation of harmful content on online social media platforms has necessitated empirical understandings of experiences of harm online and the development of practices for harm mitigation. Both understandings of harm and approaches to mitigating that harm, often through content moderation, have implicitly embedded frameworks of prioritization - what forms of harm should be researched, how policy on harmful content should be implemented, and how harmful content should be moderated. To aid efforts of better understanding the variety of online harms, how they relate to one another, and how to prioritize harms relevant to research, policy, and practice, we present a theoretical framework of severity for harmful online content. By employing a grounded theory approach, we developed a framework of severity based on interviews and card-sorting activities conducted with 52 participants over the course of ten months. Through our analysis, we identified four Types of Harm (physical, emotional, relational, and financial) and eight Dimensions along which the severity of harm can be understood (perspectives, intent, agency, experience, scale, urgency, vulnerability, sphere). We describe how our framework can be applied to both research and policy settings towards deeper understandings of specific forms of harm (e.g., harassment) and prioritization frameworks when implementing policies encompassing many forms of harm.

翻译：在线社交媒体平台上有害内容的泛滥使得有必要对网上伤害的经验和减轻伤害做法的发展形成经验性理解。对伤害的理解和减轻伤害的方法,往往通过内容节制,已经隐含了确定优先次序的框架――应当研究何种伤害形式,应当如何执行有害内容的政策,应当如何减轻有害内容的内容。为了帮助人们更好地了解网上伤害的多样性,这些伤害之间如何相互关联,以及如何优先处理与研究、政策和做法有关的伤害,我们提出了一个关于有害在线内容严重程度的理论框架。我们采用有根有据的理论方法,根据在10个月内与52名参与者进行的访谈和卡片整理活动,制定了一个严厉程度框架。我们通过分析,确定了四种伤害类型(身体、情感、关系和财政)和八个方面,其严重程度可以理解(视觉、意图、机构、经验、规模、紧迫性、脆弱性、领域)。我们描述了我们的框架如何适用于研究和政策环境,以便更深入地理解具体的伤害形式(例如,在实施许多框架时,骚扰和框架)。