Machine-assisted regulation, online participation and human moderation

Content moderation is on the rise under the current diverse online environment. Machines have been widely used to cope with the increasing need for platform regulation. On the one hand, it enables platforms to scale the regulations regularly. On the other hand, it may result in over-policing and de-humanizing in platform regulations. The role of voluntary human moderators may also change. However, few prior studies have focused on this emerging topic. To fill this research gap, we study the impact of machine-based regulations on users' and human moderators' participation. With data collected from 161 subreddits on Reddit, we found that machine-based moderation stimulates more users' participation. Moreover, delegating moderations to machine augments voluntary community managers' role as moderators but weaken their role as community users. Human moderators accomplish more moderations. Particularly, they complete more policing; they also offer more explanations and suggestions to their community members.