Both recent studies of Reddit were published as peer-reviewed papers at the International Conference on Web and Social Media, a top computational social science conference where Li will present them formally in June. This reframing led them to coin the term “data labor subsidy” when placing a dollar value on the contributions of tech platform users. Li said a key part of the PSA Group’s work involves re-framing user contributions to sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit as “work” - not passive participation in online space - because companies use data and time that users provide to generate profit: to train their algorithms, better target advertising, recruit new users and ultimately earn more revenue.
The group’s overall mission is to “identify and address societal problems that are created or exacerbated by advances in computer science.” Hecht leads the People, Space and Algorithms (PSA) Research Group at Northwestern. Li co-authored both papers with her adviser Brent Hecht, an associate professor in Northwestern’s School of Communication, and Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. “Putting a price tag on the labor that people - in this case, content moderators on Reddit - have subsidized is leverage those moderators could wield when asking platforms for better resources and tools to help them monitor more effectively,” Li said. Would being armed with that knowledge make a difference in negotiations between users and tech companies? Volunteer moderators, on the other hand, do not know how much collective work it takes to keep those online communities viable and safe, and how much that work is worth to the company. The subreddits are monitored by volunteers whose work is often framed as a labor of love, something they do because they care about and are interested in maintaining vibrant online communities, which Reddit hosts and makes available to users for free, in what might seem like a fair trade-off.īroadly, our research is about thinking through how we can redistribute the decision-making power in the tech industry to include users.” Hanlin Liīut the studies raise an important question: Are volunteer moderators and other users giving tech companies a “free ride” by providing their time, data and energy? After all, Reddit and Facebook - which also hosts groups organized around shared interests - are for-profit companies, with revenue models based on selling advertising to users. On Reddit, users are organized into communities called “subreddits” that share and discuss content related to topic areas of interest, from humor to news, art, video games and memes.
“Broadly, our research is about thinking through how we can redistribute the decision-making power in the tech industry to include users. “Big tech companies have introduced some harmful practices, facilitating the spread of misinformation and failing to adequately support volunteers battling the proliferation of harmful content online,” Li said. Putting a dollar value on the contributions of volunteer moderators for the first time could give ordinary users leverage with big tech when it comes to content moderation. Social media companies and tech platforms have gained an increasingly outsized role in shaping how information is consumed and shared as they’ve sought to expand their market shares, said lead study author Hanlin Li, a PhD student at Northwestern. Though uncompensated, this labor is highly valuable to the company: According to a pair of new studies led by Northwestern University computer scientists, it’s worth at minimum $3.4 million per year, which is equivalent to 2.8% of Reddit’s 2019 revenue. The social networking platform Reddit relies on volunteer moderators to prevent the site from being overrun by problematic content-including hate speech-and ensure that it remains appealing for users.
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