across all studies large majorities do not support any kind of moderation—not even for the threatening condition—with banning a person’s account being the least preferred option across the board (again, excluding the LGBTQ case). This finding has important implications because Democrats, who are almost twice as likely to demand moderation than Republicans (Morning Consult 2023; see also our findings below), are overrepresented and thus a more balanced sample by partisanship would probably show narrower support for content moderation. Importantly, we analyzed the effect of age on moderation preferences to examine if the variation in our outcome variable is due to our relatively younger participant pool. We do not observe large differences between younger and older age groups (see Figure S1 in the SM) when demanding moderation, while older subjects seem to be fairly frequent users of social media (around 85% said they used social media recently) (see Figure S2 in the SM). We think these results give additional credence to this study’s conclusions about how users’ attitudes toward content moderation matter for anticipating if a critical mass to make platforms more responsive to the content they host could ever materialize.
Btw these peopl's data showed a general +20% willingness to ban/censor when any of the negative speech was directed toward gays as opposed to other groups. It was even the majority in 1 case, topping 50% favoring moderation.
Btw these peopl's data showed a general +20% willingness to ban/censor when any of the negative speech was directed toward gays as opposed to other groups. It was even the majority in 1 case, topping 50% favoring moderation.