As moderation is increasingly recognised as critical labour requiring structural support, how can organisations rise to this challenge?

Dr. Jennifer Beckett is a lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne, researching online governance in social spaces. She joined guest experts Theodora Burgess and Dr. Lauren Vargas at the inaugural All Things in Moderation conference to discuss what kind of structural support moderators should be asking for and how organisations can resource their people on the digital front lines.

Why do we need institutional support for moderators?

Moderators are digital custodians of sociality and culture. Their roles require more than digital literacy: business and emotional intelligence form central parts of the care moderators provide to communities. Despite the diverse skillset moderators possess, on an institutional level, their role is often dismissed as janitorial work.

Current institutional approaches to wellbeing emphasise resilience rather than structural support. Such approaches place the onus on individual moderators to cultivate resilience on their own time and on their own budget, rather than institutions providing structure, tools, and supporting roles to support moderators.

Community Managers, Social Media Managers and other digital front line staff often have conversations about wellbeing as agents of reflective practice, sharing their thoughts, opinions, and experiences as part of their day to day roles. However, these reflective conversations often happen exclusively within specialised teams, not as part of institutions as a whole.

There is therefore a need to bridge the gaps in current institutional understanding of moderation and elevate the support for those who moderate in their work.

How organisations can help

Organisations of all kinds can help build an institutional culture of care by:

• Ensuring everyone in the organisation understands the day to day tasks of moderation. This might look like implementing “adopt an admin” initiatives where all staff have to do some moderation on an annual basis or as part of the onboarding process. Doing so can help create connections between different roles: for example, engineers and moderators can build understanding as backend staff use the tools they have created for moderators in a live setting.

Executives can also work through simulations of moderation with real examples, building a sense of understanding of what the moderator role entails as they work out their own types of responses within policy and process. These exercises, while not comparable to the challenges of moderation in a live setting, can help executives adapt process and policy for moderators.

• Connecting wellbeing to commercial value. For moderators in a for-profit environment, it’s important to communicate the commercial value of moderator wellbeing to executives. When moderators are happier, they may be more engaged with their community, this can mean higher daily active users, leading to higher retention, and higher engagement. This engagement looks better to advertisers and increases the bottom line. Communicating these insights to executives and visualising the scope and breadth of this work can help secure institutional support for moderator wellbeing.

• Addressing cumulative effects of exposure to trauma. Current approaches to wellbeing rarely address exposure to trauma beyond the short-term. However, just like physical illness, the emotional effects of being exposed to trauma may persist beyond an acute period of crisis. It’s essential to create an environment where people are comfortable to speak up if they are experiencing these delayed responses, whether that’s days, weeks or months later.

• Believing the lived experiences of minority groups. Minority communities should be given the agency to adopt their intuitive approaches to moderation. However, this agency may be mistaken for not needing institutional support. Institutions should have a plan for structural support that allows marginalised groups to control their own content while identifying where they would like institutions to step in and assist.

All Things in Moderation ran online 11-12 May 2023 and featured over 25 expert contributors from around the world and across practitioner, academic and policy disciplines.