Silencing the Voiceless: Social Media Content Moderation for At Risk Marginalized Populations in High-Stakes Violence and Human Rights Contexts in Nigeria

When ethnic minorities in the Global South use social media to document human rights abuses against them by majority groups or state actors, platforms often remove this content, thus suppressing these groups’ ability to raise awareness about their oppression. To understand ethnic minorities in the Global South’s experiences with content moderation, we conducted interviews with ethnic minority Nigerian journalists, activists, politicians, and lawyers, and digital ethnographic observation of social media posts about human rights violations. We found that participants use social media as immediate and urgent archival tools to document violence and human rights abuses against them and their communities, which would not be possible with traditional media due to systemic state exclusion. Further, we identify cultural complexities and context gaps that are frequently ignored by social media companies, who impose Global North norms and values when moderating diverse populations in the Global South. When ethnic minorities post about violence and human rights concerns, they often experience over-moderation, while harmful content that targets them with violence is often under-moderated. We argue for a specialized “social justice archive moderation” as a way to account for the documentary and archival functions that social media serves for marginalized populations in conflict zones. We argue that this approach helps to support ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and politically vulnerable populations when moderating Global South populations in high-stakes violence and human rights contexts.