ModelCitizens: Representing Community Voices in Online Safety
Authors: name: Ashima Suvarna; name: Christina Chance; name: Karolina Naranjo; name: Hamid Palangi; name: Sophie Hao; name: Thomas Hartvigsen; name: Saadia Gabriel
Published: 2025-07-07 20:15:18

Abstract: Automatic toxic language detection is critical for creating safe, inclusive
online spaces. However, it is a highly subjective task, with perceptions of
toxic language shaped by community norms and lived experience. Existing
toxicity detection models are typically trained on annotations that collapse
diverse annotator perspectives into a single ground truth, erasing important
context-specific notions of toxicity such as reclaimed language. To address
this, we introduce MODELCITIZENS, a dataset of 6.8K social media posts and 40K
toxicity annotations across diverse identity groups. To capture the role of
conversational context on toxicity, typical of social media posts, we augment
MODELCITIZENS posts with LLM-generated conversational scenarios.
State-of-the-art toxicity detection tools (e.g. OpenAI Moderation API,
GPT-o4-mini) underperform on MODELCITIZENS, with further degradation on
context-augmented posts. Finally, we release LLAMACITIZEN-8B and
GEMMACITIZEN-12B, LLaMA- and Gemma-based models finetuned on MODELCITIZENS,
which outperform GPT-o4-mini by 5.5% on in-distribution evaluations. Our
findings highlight the importance of community-informed annotation and modeling
for inclusive content moderation. The data, models and code are available at
https://github.com/asuvarna31/modelcitizens.