International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The increasing harms caused by hate, harassment, and other forms of abuse online have motivated major platforms to explore hierarchical governance. The idea is to allow communities to have designated members take on moderation and leadership duties; meanwhile, members can still escalate issues to the platform. But these promising approaches have only been explored in plaintext settings where community content is public to the platform. It is unclear how one can realize hierarchical governance in the huge and increasing number of online communities that utilize end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging for privacy. This talk will argue for the importance of adapting hierarchical governance to E2EE platforms, share some of our recent work towards privacy-preserving hierarchical governance, and discuss ongoing challenges in this space.