Replication Data for: Who Gets Flagged? An Experiment on Censorship and Bias in Social Media Reporting

In many ways social media serve as today’s town square, however, social media platforms are privately owned, and users are subject to the platform’s terms of service and community standards. To identify objectionable content, social media platforms rely in part on users to “report” offensive content which the platform then decides to leave up or take down. While users play a critical role in determining what content will be flagged for review by the platforms, we know very little about user behavior and whether users are demonstrably biased in their reporting. We run a population-based experiment to test for systematic bias in social media reporting on a nationally representative sample of Americans (2,500) and find no evidence of bias according to race or gender in predicting the likelihood that inflammatory social media posts will be flagged by other users for removal.