Hi and welcome.
Today, I'll be sharing some of the results
from my paper, which discusses what
it's like to moderate the subreddit AskHistorians,
and how its location on reddit impacts moderation work.
This work arose from an ethnographic study
of AskHistorians, during which I conducted interviews
and observed the community.
I was also provided with the full comment log,
including removed comments of this highly upvoted thread,
which asked about the context of a series of photographs
of women performing sex acts in front
of crowds of uniformed men.
AskHistorians is a subreddit with a mission
to promote public history, which is done largely
through their rules.
The rules aim to ensure that questions can get good answers
and that answers follow practices
common in academia, such as reflecting
current historical methods.
These rules are strictly enforced
and all other content is removed.
In this way, AskHistorians operates differently
than the rest of reddit, which has
longstanding platform-wide norms of freedom of speech.
The other important aspect of AskHistorians is its user base.
In a census, moderators reported that the user
base, similar to Reddit as a whole,
is young, white, and male.
This user base has a profound impact on AskHistorians,
in part due to reddit's design, which promotes
content through upvoting.
When the user base determines what content is seen,
it will largely choose topics and subjects that
align with their interests.
For AskHistorians, this means the questions and answers that
are asked and upvoted reflect topics typically associated
with male interests, as is reflected in this quote
here from SeaRocksAndTrees, who says,
"I think what it reflects to me is
that there is a lot more boyish topics that come up,
whether it's war and weapons and video games,
and then a lot of really insensitive questions
about rape."
This impact was so widely observed by moderators
that they developed an explanation for it,
an empathy gap, which is defined here by SonAgainstGold, who
says, "It illustrates a distinct empathy
gap, a socially-conditioned inability
to default extend intellectual personhood to people
different than us.
One of the absolute most-asked questions on AskHistorians is
'Did ancient soldiers have PTSD?'
Sometimes, we get to hear questions
about knights having PTSD, too.
Anyone want to take a swing at, in comparison,
how many times people asked about rape survivors and PTSD?
And when you search for it, be sure to filter out
the questions that ask about the soldier
rapists developing PTSD from massacring and raping
civilians."
This empathy gap is not limited to question asking.
We can also see empathy gaps in removed comments.
Here are a few examples from the question
asking about the context of the photographs.
These comments neglect to treat the women in the photos
as real living people.
By removing these comments, and thus,
rendering this particular empathy
gap invisible to AskHistorians' users,
moderators strive to create a safe space for women on reddit.
In our interviews, moderators regularly
expressed the belief that allowing comments
like these to stand--
and thus, potentially upvoted--
would fail to exhibit compassion towards people
who lived in the past.
In addition to removing comments,
moderators also provide responses.
In this example here, moderator KamiSpaceInvader
shifts the focus of the question from soldiers uniforms,
and thus, men, to the experiences
of the women in the photographs, highlighting issues
around coercion and consent in occupied territories.
So by controlling visibility through comment removal,
and by providing responses that recent or those often
neglected through question asking and upvoting,
AskHistorians moderators close empathy gaps
by providing space for people, histories, and perspectives
from those outside the normative demographic to tell
their stories and have their voices heard.
These measures have a very real impact,
which we can see through these quotes from users here,
the first which says, "Answers here
have helped me to inform my political opinion, my thoughts
regarding issues such as LGBT rights and feminism.
It was actually an answer here that made me fully
consider patriarchy theory.
Colonialism and its very subtle effects on today's society.
And last, but perhaps most importantly,
have had an influence on my overall thought process
and problem solving."
And in this next quote, said in response
to KamiSpaceInvader's answer in the question
asking about the photographs, which
says, "I can say with absolute certainty
that you changed my perspective on the topic at hand.
What I saw as a relatively harmless consensual situation
was revealed to be something very different,
which I never would have considered."
So what this case study demonstrates
is the power of moderation, not just as a retributive force,
but that it can also be instructional,
directly countering misinformation grounded
in historic falsehoods, and providing users with tools
to critically assess information they
encounter across platforms and communities.
Thank you.