Problematizing content moderation by social media platforms and its impact on digital harm reduction
André Belchior Gomes, Aysel Sultan
Abstract
Recent years have marked a shift in selling and buying illicit psychoactive drugs from darknet cryptomarkets to publicly accessible social media and messaging platforms. As more users turn to procuring drugs this way, the role of digital harm reduction has become particularly urgent. However, one of the main obstacles complicating the implementation of digital harm reduction is the increasingly automated content moderation by the social media platforms. While some platforms are less restrictive about harm reduction content (e.g., TikTok), others implement higher degrees of moderation, including the removal of individual content and banning of entire profile pages (e.g., Instagram). This article discusses community guidelines of five popular social media and messaging platforms and their content moderation tools. It aims to highlight how these guidelines may be inadvertently curbing the dissemination of harm reduction and health promotion materials, and erroneously interpreting it as a promotion of drug use and sales. The discussion concludes that digital harm reduction requires transdisciplinary collaboration of professional organizations, researchers, and social media platforms to ensure reliable implementation of digital harm reduction, and help build safer digital communities.