What is content moderation? Who decides what is allowed or not on the digital platforms dominating communication today, such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or TikTok? Academic, policy and popular debates of recent years suggest a diversity of answers to these questions. Platforms moderate themselves, through an increasingly globalized industry of human moderators as well as through moderation algorithms. Governments moderate, through policy and legal measures. And platform users – by accident or design – moderate one another too.  

Our research addresses a related but different question: where is content moderation? We approach this broad question by studying a more local form of social media: place-named Facebook groups across Greater London, UK. These are groups related to named places such as neighborhoods, streets, districts, or villages. Unlike platforms such as Nextdoor, which allocate users based on their geographical location, place-named Facebook groups are created, joined, and contributed to by multiple users, built around different and often overlapping geographical scales and topics. 

There are two main strands to our research. First, an in-depth interview-based study of 16 place-named Facebook groups across Greater London, representing a mix of locations (e.g., inner and outer London), group sizes (small and large) and origins (e.g., groups initiated by individuals, businesses, municipalities). This study explores how moderators negotiate spatial ‘orientations’ between ‘translocality’ and ‘locality’. 

The second strand to our research develops a broader geodemographic mapping and analysis of 3,226 neighbourhood Facebook Groups across Greater London. This aims to better understand the social and spatial distribution of Facebook as a communication platform in contemporary London life.