Moderating Tamil Content on Social Media

Part of CDT's Global South content-moderation series, this study used a mixed-methods approach: an online survey of 147 frequent social media users in India and Sri Lanka, 17 in-depth interviews with content moderators, creators, platform trust-and-safety staff, and digital rights advocates, and a roundtable with Tamil machine-learning and data experts.

It found that Western platforms remain the most widely used among Tamil speakers, though India's TikTok ban has driven growth in local alternatives. Despite an active Tamil computing community, investment in automated Tamil-language moderation was found to be inadequate, a gap the report ties to Tamil's status as a low-resource language lacking sufficient training data for robust models. Users described circumventing moderation through algospeak and code-mixed, Latin-script transliterated Tamil.

The study also contrasts platforms' global versus localized moderation approaches, concluding that inconsistent and often inaccurate enforcement of Tamil content erodes user trust and constrains free expression and access to information among Tamil-speaking communities.