Moral disengagement and content moderation attitudes: Examining how apathy to online harms may disguise racially conservative beliefs

Abstract

Social media users’ preferences for various content moderation interventions have been widely studied, but the implicit beliefs that connect to these preferences are less understood. Using a nationally representative survey data set, we investigate how end-users’ attitudes toward moderating harmful speech online relate to their offline racial attitudes. We find that racially conservative beliefs are significantly positively related to participants indicating a distaste for concepts related to content moderation and cancel culture, suggesting that racial conservatism may be a crucial factor to consider in assessing these attitudes. We discuss our findings through the lens of moral disengagement theory, positing that supporting “freedom of expression” by way of disagreeing with content moderation and cancel culture may be a contemporary mechanism of morally disengaging with the harmful effects of racially insensitive speech.