Blaming the Moderators for Inaction against Uncivil Content

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Chas Monge, who is interested how third parties make sense of online incivility, and is using the path model of blame: is there a norm violation; did an agent cause it; was this intentional; are there justified reasons for this or could it have been prevented; and on the basis of all this, what level of blame should be attributed to them?

But this path model tests instanced behaviours that begin and end in a very discrete point in time; this does not translate so well to broader uncivil behaviours which have more persistent consequences. This persistence spreads harm and blame: as uncivil behaviours persist, they are no longer seen as the fault of individual transgressors, but as the fault of higher-level others who have enabled the environment where such uncivil behaviour persists to be created and maintained – most immediately, the online moderators whose actions or inaction have enabled the transgressors to continue their transgressions.

This highlights the question of awareness: have moderators seen these uncivil messages and chosen not to do anything about them, or have they simply not seen them? As problematic content persists, however, awareness can increasingly be presumed, and inaction in spite of awareness then emerges as a significant failure to act.

This project explored this further under experimental conditions, showing 520 participants a fictional sexist Reddit post which had persisted for a shorter or longer time and had had no, weak, or strong responses from moderators. Perceptions of persistence influenced perceptions of the harmfulness of the uncivil behaviour, and moderator inaction also led to a shift of blame from the transgressor towards the moderators.