Are Open-Weight LLMs Ready for Social Media Moderation? A Comparative Study on Bluesky

One-line Summary

Open-weight large language models (LLMs) show promise for social media moderation, with performance comparable to proprietary models in detecting harmful content on platforms like Bluesky.

Plain-language Overview

With the increasing amount of harmful content on social media, effective moderation is crucial. This study investigates whether open-weight large language models (LLMs), which are freely accessible, can effectively moderate content on social media platforms like Bluesky. The researchers compared various LLMs and found that open-weight models perform similarly to proprietary ones in detecting harmful posts. This suggests that open-weight LLMs could be a feasible option for moderating content while maintaining user privacy and operating on standard consumer hardware.

Technical Details