Harmonizing the Cacophony with MIC: An Affordance-aware Framework for Platform Moderation

Social platforms are evolving at a rapid pace. With the addition of new features like real-time audio, the landscape of online communities and moderation work on these communities is being out-paced by platform development. In this paper, we present a novel framework that allows us to represent the dynamic moderation ecosystems of social platforms using a base-set of 12 platform-level affordances, along with inter-affordance relationships. These affordances fall into the three categories -- Members, Infrastructure, and Content. We call this the MIC framework, and apply MIC to analyze several social platforms in two case studies. First we analyze individual platforms using MIC and demonstrate how MIC can be used to examine the effects of platform changes on the moderation ecosystem and identify potential new challenges in moderation. Next, we systematically compare three platforms using MIC and propose potential moderation mechanisms that platforms can adapt from one another. Moderation researchers and platform designers can use such comparisons to uncover where platforms can emulate established, successful and better-studied platforms, as well as learn from the pitfalls other platforms have encountered.