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What if moderation didn’t mean suppression for the user? #CHI2026 For the past year, my advisor @farnazj.bsky.social and I have been exploring a frustration: content moderation is centralized and binary, even though harm is often subjective.

2/2/26, 4:03 am0 reposts3 likes

Rayhan Rashed

@rayhan.io

2 Feb

When platforms decide globally what’s "safe", they end up doing two things at once: failing to protect users from what they find harmful, and bluntly suppressing content that others would want to engage with.

Rayhan Rashed

@rayhan.io

2 Feb

So we asked: what if moderation could act on personalized notions of harm, while preserving as much social and informational value as possible? What if that meant transforming content instead of suppressing it?

Rayhan Rashed

@rayhan.io

2 Feb

Our CHI'26 paper + system transforms social media content in real-time, based on your definition of harm. Rather than removing content, it can obfuscate, re-render, or modify text and images, softening what a user wants to avoid while preserving what they still find valuable in the same post.

Rayhan Rashed

@rayhan.io

2 Feb

This was a full end-to-end HCI project (needfinding → design → build → multi-round evaluation), and one of the most fun (and intense) things I’ve built from the ground up.