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Best Practices for Deletion of Harmful Content on Social Media: Choosing between hard and soft deletion policies
Social media platforms must rethink their approach to content moderation, moving beyond the
binary question of whether to remove harmful content and instead focusing on how content is
removed. One design choice in this area is between hard and soft delete. The current norm of
hard deletion, where offending posts are entirely erased without any indication they ever existed,
causes conversations to lose important context. We propose that platforms shift to a policy of
soft deletion as the default. With soft deletion, when a post is removed for violating content
guidelines or laws, a notice is put in its place indicating that it was deleted and why. This
preserves the flow and coherence of discussions while still removing the harmful content itself.
However, we believe impacted users should be given a choice. Platforms should allow those
affected by harmful posts to opt out of soft deletion in favor of hard deletion on a case-by-case
basis. The key is providing agency to those most directly impacted. When implementing soft
deletion notices, platforms must be thoughtful about what information to include. At a minimum,
notices should indicate that a post was removed, specify which rule was violated, and ideally
provide a link to the relevant content policy. Notices could also include the username of the poster
and the date of the original post. This additional context promotes transparency and
accountability.
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