The 2nd International Workshop on

Socio-Technical Approaches

to Content Moderation and Platform Governance (COMPASS)

in conjunction with

The 29th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work And Social Computing (CSCW'26)

will take place in Salt Lake City, Utah (USA) on October 10, 2026

co-located with the ACM CSCW'26 conference.

About the Workshop

Content moderation is one of the central socio-technical challenges of contemporary online platforms. Social media, online communities, livestreaming services, generative AI systems, and other digital infrastructures shape how people communicate, participate in public discourse, and engage in collective and economic activities. At the same time, these environments must address a wide range of harms, including misinformation, hate speech, harassment, exploitative content, and coordinated manipulation, alongside evolving legal and regulatory requirements concerning transparency, accountability, and user protection. Rather than being limited to automated detection, content moderation involves complex socio-technical work: defining and interpreting community guidelines, designing and evaluating interventions, supporting moderators and affected users, and balancing competing values such as safety, expression, and fairness across diverse cultural and institutional contexts. Moderation also operates across multiple levels, from individual experiences to community dynamics and platform governance.

Despite the growing importance of content moderation, work in this area is still spread across different communities. Technical research often focuses on automated detection and machine learning, while legal, policy, HCI, and social science perspectives are developed in parallel. This separation makes it harder to connect insights across methods and levels of analysis. COMPASS aims to address this gap by bringing together computational, human-centered, organizational, and governance perspectives on moderation as a socio-technical challenge.

COMPASS is designed as a highly interactive workshop emphasizing discussion, exchange, and collaboration. We particularly encourage submissions that bridge methodological and disciplinary boundaries, including empirical, computational, qualitative, theoretical, design-oriented, legal, and mixed-methods approaches. By fostering sustained dialogue across research communities, COMPASS seeks to advance more holistic, human-centered, and societally grounded approaches to online safety, moderation, and platform governance.

Main Topics

The workshop welcomes contributions spanning topics such as:

Community guidelines and governance: Design, evolution, and impact of platform policies, and their alignment with community norms and regulatory frameworks.
Moderation interventions and downstream effects: Design and evaluation of interventions (e.g., removals, warnings, visibility modifications), including causal inference and downstream effects.
Metrics and evaluation: Measures of moderation effectiveness, platform health, and societal impact.
Human-centered moderation: Interactions between human moderators, users, and automated systems; psychological and experiential dimensions.
Cross-cultural and societal dimensions of moderation: Cross-cultural differences, inclusivity, and the role of diverse communities in shaping moderation practices.
Legal and regulatory implications: Impacts of frameworks such as the DSA and AI Act on platform governance and accountability.
Ethics and values: Trade-offs between safety, privacy, autonomy, and freedom of expression.
Data and transparency: Access to moderation data, auditing practices, and reproducibility challenges.
Decentralized and participatory moderation: Community-driven and distributed approaches to moderation and governance.
Emerging technologies: Moderation challenges related to generative AI, LLM-powered moderation interventions, live and real-time content, and new platform modalities.
Moderation challenges involving vulnerable or high-profile populations: Unique moderation concerns in the context of special groups, such as politicians, activists, journalists, and children.

Important Dates

Paper submission: July 10, 2026
Notification: July 31, 2026
Workshop: October 10, 2026

How to submit