TY - GEN
T1 - Volunteer Moderation as Situated Civic Labor in Local Information Infrastructures
AU - Cotter, Kelley
AU - De, Ankolika
AU - Battocchio, Ava Francesca
AU - Davis, Benji
AU - Antolini, Marialina
AU - Proferes, Nicholas
AU - Thorson, Kjerstin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2026 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2026/4/13
Y1 - 2026/4/13
N2 - Local information is essential for civic engagement, community belonging and well-being, and collective action. As more U.S. communities become "news deserts"without local newspapers or broadcast media, neighborhood- and municipality-level groups on platforms like Facebook, Nextdoor, and Reddit have become key nodes in local information infrastructure. This paper examines how volunteer moderators of these local online groups contribute to sustaining local information infrastructure, focusing on how they understand their groups' informational function, the roles they assume to realize this function, and the skills they mobilize to fulfill perceived roles. Drawing on an Asynchronous Remote Community study and in-depth interviews with U.S.-based moderators, we conceptualize local volunteer moderation as situated civic labor, emphasizing the interpretive, relational, and context-contingent nature of their work. We offer design implications for platforms to support local knowledge and discretion and sustain democratic practices to strengthen the civic potential of online spaces to serve their local communities.
AB - Local information is essential for civic engagement, community belonging and well-being, and collective action. As more U.S. communities become "news deserts"without local newspapers or broadcast media, neighborhood- and municipality-level groups on platforms like Facebook, Nextdoor, and Reddit have become key nodes in local information infrastructure. This paper examines how volunteer moderators of these local online groups contribute to sustaining local information infrastructure, focusing on how they understand their groups' informational function, the roles they assume to realize this function, and the skills they mobilize to fulfill perceived roles. Drawing on an Asynchronous Remote Community study and in-depth interviews with U.S.-based moderators, we conceptualize local volunteer moderation as situated civic labor, emphasizing the interpretive, relational, and context-contingent nature of their work. We offer design implications for platforms to support local knowledge and discretion and sustain democratic practices to strengthen the civic potential of online spaces to serve their local communities.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105038698066
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105038698066#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1145/3772318.3790469
DO - 10.1145/3772318.3790469
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105038698066
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2026 - Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
A2 - Oliver, Nuria
A2 - Shamma, David A.
A2 - Candello, Heloisa
A2 - Cesar, Pablo
A2 - Lopes, Pedro
A2 - Bozzon, Alessandro
A2 - Kosch, Thomas
A2 - Liao, Vera
A2 - Ma, Xiaojuan
A2 - Artizzu, Valentino
A2 - Draxler, Fiona
A2 - Lopez, Gustavo
A2 - Reinschluessel, Anke V.
A2 - Tong, Xin
A2 - Toups Dugas, Phoebe O.
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2026
Y2 - 13 April 2026 through 17 April 2026
ER -