Knowing When to Escalate: Disagreement Patterns for Uncertainty-Aware Content Moderation

Abstract

Agentic content-moderation systems increasingly rely on collective judgments from LLM agents, while aggregation methods commonly treat inter-agent disagreement as a reliability problem to be removed through consensus or voting. This framing is inappropriate for value-laden tasks, where disagreement may reflect irreducible value pluralism - a distinction standard uncertainty decompositions cannot recover, since they operate on output distributions and discard the reasoning behind each judgment. We propose Reasoning Trace Divergence Analysis (RTDA), which embeds model-generated justifications from perspective-differentiated agents and classifies each case by justification similarity and conclusion agreement. The resulting four-state taxonomy isolates convergent disagreement, where agents reasoning similarly but concluding differently, as a candidate signature of value-laden conflict. On 1,000 items from the Measuring Hate Speech corpus, this structural signal predicts human annotator disagreement better than magnitude-only and output-only baselines. We contribute a design principle: condition human escalation on the structure of disagreement, not its magnitude alone, with RTDA serving as a post-processing layer for systems that already generate reasoning traces.