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This article examines the rationale underpinning the economic, technical and editorial functioning of content moderation services. The authors’ original research approach combines: an interview and observation survey undertaken in February and March 2016 on one of the three main moderation service providers for French media; and a semi-automated and comparative analysis of a sample of published and unpublished messages on three news websites, on the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. The authors thus compare the work of moderation, embedded in a broader socio-economic framework and subject to multiple legal, technical and industrial constraints, on the one hand, with the quality and diversity of the information that it produces and makes available in the digital public space, on the other.