OLIVER L.
HAIMSON,
Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Toward equitable social media content moderation for marginalized individuals and communities

In this line of research, my collaborators and I address online content moderation and user bans from the point of view of people from marginalized groups whose content or account was removed because it was wrongly or debatably deemed inappropriate by a platform. We examine identities and content that are false positives or gray areas – users and content that are removed from a site yet do not actually violate site policies, or fall into a gray area with respect to site policies and community norms. This research is funded by my NSF CAREER grant, "Toward Equitable Social Media Content Moderation for Marginalized Individuals and Communities."

Selected Publications


Samuel Mayworm, Michael Ann DeVito, Daniel Delmonaco, Hibby Thach, and Oliver L. Haimson. 2024. Content Moderation Folk Theories and Perceptions of Platform Spirit Among Marginalized Social Media Users. ACM Transactions on Social Computing (forthcoming).
[open-access link] [PDF] [video]

Hibby Thach, Samuel Mayworm, Daniel Delmonaco, and Oliver L. Haimson. 2022. (In)visible moderation: A digital ethnography of marginalized users and content moderation on Twitch and Reddit. New Media & Society.
[link] [PDF] [press]

Oliver L. Haimson, Daniel Delmonaco, Peipei Nie, and Andrea Wegner. 2021. Disproportionate Removals and Differing Content Moderation Experiences for Conservative, Transgender, and Black Social Media Users: Marginalization and Moderation Gray Areas Proceedings of the ACM Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI) (CSCW 2021).
[open-access link] [PDF] [video] [summary]

Shakira L. Smith, Oliver L. Haimson, Claire Fitzsimmons, and Nikki Echarte Brown (a community report by the Salty Algorithmic Bias Collective). 2021. Censorship of Marginalized Communities on Instagram. Salty.
[link]

Sarita Schoenebeck, Oliver L. Haimson, and Lisa Nakamura. 2021. Drawing from Justice Theories to Support Targets of Online Harassment. New Media & Society.
[link] [PDF] [press]

Taika Augustaitis, Leland Merrill, Kristi E. Gamarel, and Oliver L. Haimson. 2021. Online Transgender Health Information Seeking: Facilitators, Barriers, and Future Directions. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21).
[open-access link] [PDF] [video]

Oliver L. Haimson, Justin Buss, Zu Weinger, Denny L. Starks, Dykee Gorrell, and Briar Sweetbriar Baron. 2020. Trans Time: Safety, Privacy, and Content Warnings on a Transgender-Specific Social Media Site. Proceedings of the ACM Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI) (CSCW 2020).
[link] [PDF] [video]