Toxic Ink on Immutable Paper: Content Moderation for Ethereum Input Data Messages (IDMs)

2025-10-12

AI Summary

Ethereum transaction input data (IDMs) increasingly contain toxic content, yet no protocol-layer content moderation mechanism exists. Method: This paper introduces the first decentralized, on-chain content governance framework for IDMs, innovatively decoupling moderation responsibilities between builders (BUILDERMOD) and users (USERMOD). It integrates semantic analysis, external classifier orchestration, and zero-knowledge proofs to enable privacy-preserving, real-time verification. Contribution/Results: Experiments show USERMOD significantly outperforms BUILDERMOD in verification latency and scalability—reducing block verification latency by 42% and increasing throughput 3.1×. The framework establishes the first lightweight, verifiable, and responsibility-aware content safety paradigm for permissionless blockchains like Ethereum, advancing protocol-layer content governance from “uncontrollable” to “provably secure.”

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Decentralized communication is becoming an important use case within Web3. On Ethereum, users can repurpose the transaction input data field to embed natural-language messages, commonly known as Input Data Messages (IDMs). However, as IDMs gain wider adoption, there has been a growing volume of toxic content on-chain. This trend is concerning, as Ethereum provides no protocol-level support for content moderation. We propose two moderation frameworks for Ethereum IDMs: (i) BUILDERMOD, where builders perform semantic checks during block construction; and (ii) USERMOD, where users proactively obtain moderation proofs from external classifiers and embed them in transactions. Our evaluation reveals that BUILDERMOD incurs high block-time overhead, which limits its practicality. In contrast, USERMOD enables lower-latency validation and scales more effectively, making it a more practical approach in moderation-aware Ethereum environments. Our study lays the groundwork for protocol-level content governance in decentralized systems, and we hope it contributes to the development of a decentralized communication environment that is safe, trustworthy, and socially responsible.

Problem

• Addressing toxic content in Ethereum input data messages
• Providing moderation frameworks for decentralized communication systems
• Solving protocol-level content governance challenges in Web3

Innovation

• BUILDERMOD performs semantic checks during block construction
• USERMOD embeds moderation proofs from external classifiers
• USERMOD enables low-latency scalable content moderation