Procedural Justice and Self Governance on Twitter: Unpacking the Experience of RuleBreaking on Twitter

Online platforms are increasingly being held to account forthe content that their users post. Regulation of content has long been asecondary concern of platforms, but more recently as platforms focuson their content governance, they have typically drawn their regulatorymodel from offline legal frameworks built around sanctioning and pun-ishment of rule violators. This study approaches these problems usingan alternative approach, also drawn from legal scholarship, that is basedupon motivating voluntary rule following by emphasizing the fairness ofplatform rules and the justice of the processes used to communicatecontent moderation decisions. Using a survey (n=10,487) sent to ruleviolators on Twitter paired with an analysis of participants’ platform be-haviors, this study looks at the relationship between people’s judgmentsof the procedural justice of an enforcement action and the participants’likelihood of reoffending in the future. We find that those who felt morefairly treated during their enforcement were less likely to recidivate (beta= -.05, p < .001). This, along with the study’s other findings, indicates anopportunity for platforms to put a stronger focus on people’s experiencewith enforcement systems as a potential pathway for reducing recidivism.