Research

COMPASS: The 2nd International Workshop on Socio-technical Approaches to Content Moderation and Platform Governance.

Robyn Caplan, Stefano Cresci, Catalina Goanta, Shagun Jhaver, Sanjay R Kairam, Koustuv Saha, and Savvas Zannettou (2026), “COMPASS: The 2nd International Workshop on Socio-technical Approaches to Content Moderation and Platform Governance.,” In the 30th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2026). DOI: 10.1145/3785651.3818816 CSCW Workshop. https://sites.google.com/view/workshop-compass26

Abstract

Content moderation is one of the central socio-technical challenges of contemporary online platforms. Social media, online communities, livestreaming services, generative AI systems, and other digital infrastructures shape how people communicate, participate in public discourse, and engage in collective and economic activities. At the same time, these environments must address a wide range of harms, including misinformation, hate speech, harassment, exploitative content, and coordinated manipulation, alongside evolving legal and regulatory requirements concerning transparency, accountability, and user protection. Rather than being limited to automated detection, content moderation involves complex socio-technical work: defining and interpreting community guidelines, designing and evaluating interventions, supporting moderators and affected users, and balancing competing values such as safety, expression, and fairness across diverse cultural and institutional contexts. Moderation also operates across multiple levels, from individual experiences to community dynamics and platform governance.

Despite the growing importance of content moderation, work in this area is still spread across different communities. Technical research often focuses on automated detection and machine learning, while legal, policy, HCI, and social science perspectives are developed in parallel. This separation makes it harder to connect insights across methods and levels of analysis. COMPASS aims to address this gap by bringing together computational, human-centered, organizational, and governance perspectives on moderation as a socio-technical challenge.

COMPASS is designed as a highly interactive workshop emphasizing discussion, exchange, and collaboration. We particularly encourage submissions that bridge methodological and disciplinary boundaries, including empirical, computational, qualitative, theoretical, design-oriented, legal, and mixed-methods approaches. By fostering sustained dialogue across research communities, COMPASS seeks to advance more holistic, human-centered, and societally grounded approaches to online safety, moderation, and platform governance.

BibTeX citation

@inproceedings{jhaver2026compass,
author = {Caplan, Robyn and Cresci, Stefano and Goanta, Catalina and Jhaver, Shagun and Kairam, Sanjay R and Saha, Koustuv and Zannettou, Savvas},
title = {COMPASS: The 2nd International Workshop on Socio-technical Approaches to Content Moderation and Platform Governance},
year = {2026},
isbn = {9798400723780},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3785651.3818816},
doi = {10.1145/3785651.3818816},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 Companion of the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing},
pages = {690–694},
numpages = {5},
keywords = {Content Moderation, Platform Governance, Socio-technical Systems, Online Communities, Trust and Safety, Human-centered AI},
location = {Salt Lake City, USA},
series = {CSCW Companion '26}
}