Moderating the Workplace: Governing Communication Channels for Platform Workers

Platform workers often experience isolation in their work. They use online forums to connect, but their moderation remains underexplored. Article 20 of the EU Platform Work Directive requires digital labour platforms to provide workers with a “communication channel” and leaves interpretation for how to design it up to the platforms. To inform this issue, we qualitatively analyse community rules and moderator comments across 28 worker subreddits. We show how moderators work to reduce harms such as racism and doxxing, cultivate their community through curation, and decide whether to enforce or resist work platform policy. The discussion presents implications for design for worker communication channels. The channels should be spaces with independent moderation and data protection-by-design that enable workers to safely build collective knowledge without fear of platform monitoring. Future work should follow implementations during transposition and test which governance and interface choices produce trust and capacity for collective action. Our contribution is to surface the governance dimension of worker communication and to translate these insights into design implications for future channels.