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

Abstract

Content moderation is an essential yet increasingly complex component of maintaining safe and inclusive online environments. Platforms navigate a growing range of harms, including misinformation, hate speech, harassment, exploitative material, and emerging challenges associated with generative AI and evolving platform infrastructures. At the same time, content moderation extends well beyond automated detection: it also involves defining community guidelines, designing intervention strategies, assessing downstream effects, promoting desirable contributions, and accounting for cultural, legal, and organizational differences across contexts. Addressing these challenges requires a multidisciplinary perspective that connects socio-technical approaches with human-centered design, governance, ethics, and regulation. COMPASS will thus foster a dialogue on content moderation and platform governance among researchers and practitioners from CSCW, HCI, computational social science, law, communication, and related fields. Building on the strong engagement of the first edition, successfully held at AAAI ICWSM 2025, this workshop will provide a venue to examine moderation as a socio-technical problem shaped by platforms, policies, communities, and institutional constraints. By bringing together diverse perspectives and emphasizing interaction and exchange, COMPASS will strengthen cross-disciplinary collaboration and advance timely, human-centered approaches to online safety and governance.