What moderation tactics have you used or seen as a mechanism to curtail the spread of misinformation in communities and on social media platforms? Word detection, link blocking, and digital stickers promoting legitimate information sources may immediately come to mind. But what would happen if you ran your moderation tools against URLs shared in link-in-bio services used in your community? Or what if you learned that folks on your platform were using specific codewords to circumvent word detection? Or posting screenshots of misinformation rather than using plain-text? People are getting creative with how they share all types of information online, misinformation included. Are our moderation strategies keeping up? In this discussion, Patrick chats with Joseph Schafer, an undergraduate student of Computer Science and Ethics at the University of Washington and Rachel Moran, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. They discuss their research and how anti-vaccine advocates are circumventing content moderation efforts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and large social networks. Some of their findings might surprise you! For example, specific folk theories have emerged that define how some believe social platforms and algorithms work to moderate their content and conversations. And whether these theories are true or not, the strategies forming around them do seem to help people keep questionable content up long enough for researchers to come across it. So, where do we start? How can we detect misinformation if people are using codewords like pizza or Moana to get around our tools and teams? There may not be precise solutions here just yet, but Rachel and Joseph both offer ideas to help us down the right path, which starts with deciding that the engagement that brews around misinformation is not safe for the long-term health of your community. Among our topics: Why Linktree needs community guidelines and how link-in-bio sites have become a vector for misinformation The folk theories that are informing how we perceive and operate around social media algorithms Adapting your moderation strategies to better find misinformation Our Podcast is Made Possible By… If you enjoy our show, please know that it’s only possible with the generous support of our sponsor: Vanilla, a one-stop shop for online community. Big Quotes Using lexical variation to circumvent moderation filters (2:45): “They found this big group of people who were using ‘dancing’ or other kinds of verbs to mean getting the vaccine. Complete replacement of the word [vaccine]. You wouldn’t know that that meant vaccination unless you were a member of that community and had the institutional knowledge that comes with being a member. We see [lexical variation] on a spectrum.” –@rachelemoran Emojis, code words, and symbols can form the insider language of a community (3:08): “We see ‘v@ccine’ where the A is an @ sign or people using the vaccine emoji rather than using the word at all. They believe that if they put that instead of spelling out vaccine, … they’ll avoid being caught up in the algorithmic moderation that happens on platforms.” –@rachelemoran Misinformation finds a hiding place in link-in-bios (5:05): “There’s a variety of ways that you can … get around [link blocks]. One might be, for example, using a screenshot of an article or something that is vaccine misinformation, rather than putting in the text of the misinformation directly. … There’s also various websites like URL shorteners or URL compilers, or even just a Word document … that is filled with links to sites that maybe these major platforms are moderating and blocking.” –@joey__schafer Using vaccination promotion tools to promote anti-vaccine content (10:56): “[On Instagram stories, you can use] that little sticker that says, ‘Let’s get vaccinated.’ Then Instagram collates those of your friends that have [used that] sticker … and it goes at the top of your [s