Reclaiming Moderation: Towards a Model of Moderated Counterspeech in the Digital Public Sphere

Online platforms play an ever-expanding role in social life, creating a privileged ground for the festering of hate, but also harbouring potential as tools of redress. In them, user-generated content is managed through a largely binary system of inaction/deletion, enabled by a permissive legal environment. This chapter argues that the designation by which such system is known—‘content moderation’—is euphemistic and misleads the public as to the nature of the practice, which is eminently adjudicatory. Renaming it as ‘content adjudication’ corrects a conceptual and linguistic glitch and brings to light the need for regulation and a heightened standard of due process. However, this still falls short of providing proper reparation to victims of cyberhate. Thus, a new model of moderation should be devised as a supplement to content adjudication, providing opportunities for meaningful interchanges between disputing parties, and a much-needed pathway to recovery.