facilitation

The bad faith slippage of moderation = censorship rests on the fundamentally mistaken conception of moderation as the use of rules to decide what content is allowed and what content should be removed.

The problem of moderation—in this (mistaken) conception—then becomes “fairness,” situated either in the rule creation and/or rule application. From here also stems the temptation for a quick technological fix, since technocrats inherently peddle the myth that a technical approach can transcend human messiness and thus be “fair”. But that isn't even the biggest issue.

The bigger issue is that by focusing on the rules moderation becomes entirely oriented towards the individual. Moderation becomes the judging of individuals and their actions according to the rules to determine whether content can stay or must go. Not incidentally this is also what liberal, and especially libertarian, ideology gets wrong about how society works.

Because that’s not what moderation is at all. Moderation is about structuring a space to allow for the community you want. You don’t moderate for individuals, you moderate for the group. The reason for taking an action as moderator isn’t because someone is guilty of breaking the rules but because of how they are affecting the community. This is a fundamentally different guiding principle for moderation. (And also points to the limitations of so many online moderating tools that only focus on removal/limiting who can see what.)

I’ll give just one, very innocuous and apolitical, example. I am a mod on reddit for r/violinist. We have rules and procedures around asking questions that are addressed in the FAQ and are sometimes very strict about it. People then complain that we have unjustly removed their perfectly legitimate question. And, that’s sort of true. There is nothing inherently bad about asking “can you help me pick my first violin?” … except when you’re the Nth person to ask that day and the stream of similar questions is making it difficult regular community members to engage in meaningful and helpful conversation.

This is of course true beyond online spaces. We are always making decisions about how to structure spaces to allow for the people and interactions we want. Thinking of moderation this way helps us escape the trap of focusing on rules and slipping into conversations about censorship. I think it also invites us to rethink a little what we want our online spaces to look like and how we want them to function.