The Impacts of Content Inclusiveness and Content Moderation Practices: Evidence From a Social Media Platform

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of two opposite trends, content inclusiveness and content moderation, on media consumption in the context of social media platforms. The authors leverage a novel data set and use the biterm topic model and the Sentence-BERT model to quantify content deviation: the semantic gap between a publication and the platform's preferred stances. An empirical framework is proposed to model both consumers' consumption decisions and content creators' creation decisions (i.e., the demand and supply sides), with a focus on content deviation. The estimation results show that consumers have a strong preference for publications with higher levels of content deviation. However, when the content space's environment deviation---the aggregation of publications' content deviation---reaches a high level, consumers tend to reduce their consumption because of deviation overload. Furthermore, the paper studies how consumption is affected by three commonly used content moderation practices: adjusting the strictness of the platform's enforcement on its stances, account suspension, and topic demonetization. The results are largely determined by the interplay between the two aforementioned forces on the demand side. The insights from this study can help content creators and social media platforms make informed decisions.

Keywords: Content Moderation, Media Consumption, Content Inclusiveness, Discrete Choice Model, Sentence-BERT