Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald

Abstract

The subreddit r/The_Donald was repeatedly denounced as a toxic and misbehaving online community, reasons for which it faced a sequence of increasingly constraining moderation interventions by Reddit administrators. It was quarantined in June 2019, restricted in February 2020, and finally banned in June 2020, but despite precursory work on the matter, the effects of this sequence of interventions are still unclear. In this work, we follow a multidimensional causal inference approach to study data containing more than 15M posts made in a time frame of 2 years, to examine the effects of such interventions inside and outside of the subreddit. We find that the interventions greatly reduced the activity of problematic users. However, the interventions also caused an increase in toxicity and led users to share more polarized and less factual news. In addition, the restriction had stronger effects than the quarantine, and core users of r/The_Donald suffered stronger effects than the rest of users. Overall, our results provide evidence that the interventions had mixed effects and paint a nuanced picture of the consequences of community-level moderation strategies. We conclude by reflecting on the challenges of policing online platforms and on the implications for the design and deployment of moderation interventions.

Accepted at CSCW'22

References in corpus (3)

• Inferring causal impact using Bayesian structural time-series models
• Personalized Interventions for Online Moderation
• Roots of Trumpism: Homophily and Social Feedback in Donald Trump Support on Reddit

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior and Information Spreading on Twitter
• SoK: Content Moderation in Social Media, from Guidelines to Enforcement, and Research to Practice
• The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media
• Temporal Dynamics of Coordinated Online Behavior: Stability, Archetypes, and Influence
• The Great Ban: Efficacy and Unintended Consequences of a Massive Deplatforming Operation on Reddit
• The DSA Transparency Database: Auditing Self-reported Moderation Actions by Social Media
• One of Many: Assessing User-level Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald
• Contextualized Counterspeech: Strategies for Adaptation, Personalization, and Evaluation
• Beyond Trial-and-Error: Predicting User Abandonment After a Moderation Intervention