Construct · 3 fields · 5 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
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In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (c. 350 BCE), a virtue of character is a mean between two failings, one of excess and one of deficiency, chosen by practical reason and settled by habit. Moderation, the virtue the Greeks called sophrosyne and later writers rendered as temperance, is the specific mean that governs the appetites and bodily pleasures, standing between self-indulgence and a numb insensibility to what one should enjoy. Here moderation names a trait of a person's character, assessed by how they act and feel over a life, not a variable that alters a statistical relationship or a rule enforced on posts to a platform.[1]
David R. Saunders (1956) named the moderator variable: a variable whose values change how well one variable predicts another, so a prediction that holds in one subgroup weakens or reverses in another. Baron and Kenny (1986) gave the canonical modern account, defining moderation as an interaction in which the effect of a predictor on an outcome depends on the level of a third variable, and separating it sharply from mediation. Here moderation is a role a measured variable plays inside a model, tested as an interaction term, not a virtue of character or the policing of content on a platform.[2][3]
James Grimmelmann (2015) set out content moderation as the governance of online communities: the mix of rules, screening, and human and automated decisions by which a platform decides what user-posted material stays up, comes down, or is ranked and hidden. Tarleton Gillespie's Custodians of the Internet (2018) traced how this work became central to the major platforms and how much of it is done at scale and out of sight. Here moderation is an activity a platform performs on the content its users submit, judged by what it removes and allows, not a virtue of a person's character or a variable that conditions a statistical effect.[4][5]
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