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.在诸多层面，社交媒体已然成为当代公共广场，但社交媒体平台均为私有企业，用户需遵守平台的服务条款与社区规范。为识别违规内容，社交媒体平台部分依赖用户“举报（report）”冒犯性内容，再由平台自行决定保留或删除该内容。尽管用户在决定哪些内容会被平台标记审核方面发挥着关键作用，但我们对用户的举报行为，以及用户在举报过程中是否存在可证实的偏见，却知之甚少。本研究针对2500名美国成年人的全国代表性样本开展基于人群的实验，以检验社交媒体举报行为中的系统性偏见；研究结果显示，在预测煽动性社交媒体帖文被其他用户举报删除的可能性时，未发现存在种族或性别相关的偏见证据。