Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization — Paper

Abstract

The growing complexity of content moderation policies presents a critical challenge for their consistent operationalization. While foundation models possess the basic capabilities needed to confront this challenge, whether they can reliably moderate online content remains an unanswered question. In this paper, we systematically compare two competing paradigms for Vision-Language Model (VLM) guidance: an instruction-driven approach where models reason from policy precepts, and an example-driven approach where they generalize from prior precedents. We ground this investigation in ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated, in-the-wild posts from the Bluesky platform. Our experiments reveal that foundation models can substantially outperform Bluesky's deployed moderation system, nearly tripling its $F_1$ score (0.60 vs. 0.22) on Random Posts in the benchmark, with both instruction- and example-driven paradigms achieving comparable peak effectiveness. Our findings thus chart a path toward reliable and adaptable policy operationalization at scale.

Authors 9

Ayan Majumdar, Shounak Paul, Pushpdeep Singh, Ines Abdelaziz, Sayeh Jarollahi, Seungeon Lee, Krishna P. Gummadi, Ingmar Weber, Abhisek Dash

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.10410
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: cross
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.10410
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.10410
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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9

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T19

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2 h ago

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Authors: Ayan Majumdar, Shounak Paul, Pushpdeep Singh

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Claim history for Official page
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10410	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperCan Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization
New paper: Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization
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arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.AI	feed	T1· Official	2 h ago	1

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