The Content Moderator's Dilemma: Removal of Toxic Content and Distortions to Online Discourse
Journal: ArXiv.org
Year: 2024

There is an ongoing debate about how to moderate toxic speech on social media and the impact of content moderation on online discourse. This paper proposes and validates a methodology for measuring the content-moderation-induced distortions in online discourse using text embeddings from computational linguistics. Applying the method to a representative sample of 5 million US political Tweets, we find that removing toxic Tweets alters the semantic composition of content. This finding is consisten