Behavior Change in Response to Subreddit Bans and External Events

Thomas, Pamela Bilo; Riehm, Daniel; Glenski, Maria; Weninger, Tim

doi:10.1109/tcss.2021.3061957

Cited by 15 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Past work has been quick to conclude that subreddit bans either are (Chandrasekharan et al, 2017;Saleem and Ruths, 2018;Thomas et al, 2021) or are not (Habib et al, 2019) effective at changing user behavior. We have found that results differ between subreddits and between more and less active users within a subreddit.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The majority of past work on bans of harmful communities on Reddit only examined one or two subreddits, often chosen due to notoriety (Hazel Kwon and Shao, 2020;Chandrasekharan et al, 2017;Saleem and Ruths, 2018;Ribeiro et al, 2020a;Habib et al, 2019;Thomas et al, 2021). Many of these studies focused on the average change in behavior across users and did not consider the factors which may drive inter-individual differences in behavior following a ban (Chandrasekharan et al, 2017;Saleem and Ruths, 2018;Habib et al, 2019).…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A user's activity levels prior to a ban also impacted whether activity levels increased or decreased upon migrating to a different platform (Ribeiro et al, 2020a). Similarly, Thomas et al (2021) demonstrated that users who were more active in a subreddit prior to a ban were more likely to change their behavior following the banning of that subreddit, but the authors did not investigate the ways in which users changed their behavior. Lastly, Hazel Kwon and Shao (2020) found that a user's pre-ban activity level within r/alphabaymarket in-fluenced post-ban shifts in communicative activity.…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Though limited, there is some evidence to suggest that subreddit bans may be effective by certain metrics. Past work has demonstrated that these bans can have both user-and community-level effects (Hazel Kwon and Shao, 2020;Chandrasekharan et al, 2017;Saleem and Ruths, 2018;Ribeiro et al, 2020a;Thomas et al, 2021;Habib et al, 2019). Several of these studies have suggested that (1) subreddit bans may lead a significant number of users to completely stop using the site, and that (2) following a ban, users that remain on the platform appear to decrease their levels of harmful speech on Reddit (Saleem and Ruths, 2018;Thomas et al, 2021;Habib et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Past work has demonstrated that these bans can have both user-and community-level effects (Hazel Kwon and Shao, 2020;Chandrasekharan et al, 2017;Saleem and Ruths, 2018;Ribeiro et al, 2020a;Thomas et al, 2021;Habib et al, 2019). Several of these studies have suggested that (1) subreddit bans may lead a significant number of users to completely stop using the site, and that (2) following a ban, users that remain on the platform appear to decrease their levels of harmful speech on Reddit (Saleem and Ruths, 2018;Thomas et al, 2021;Habib et al, 2019). Chandrasekharan et al (2017) also illustrated that postban migrations of users to different subreddits did not result in naive users adopting offensive language related to the banned communities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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When the Echo Chamber Shatters: Examining the Use of Community-Specific Language Post-Subreddit Ban

Trujillo¹,

Rosenblatt²,

Anda-Jáuregui³

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021)

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Community-level bans are a common tool against groups that enable online harassment and harmful speech. Unfortunately, the efficacy of community bans has only been partially studied and with mixed results. Here, we provide a flexible unsupervised methodology to identify in-group language and track user activity on Reddit both before and after the ban of a community (subreddit). We use a simple word frequency divergence to identify uncommon words overrepresented in a given community, not as a proxy for harmful speech but as a linguistic signature of the community. We apply our method to 15 banned subreddits, and find that community response is heterogeneous between subreddits and between users of a subreddit. Top users were more likely to become less active overall, while random users often reduced use of in-group language without decreasing activity. Finally, we find some evidence that the effectiveness of bans aligns with the content of a community. Users of dark humor communities were largely unaffected by bans while users of communities organized around white supremacy and fascism were the most affected. Altogether, our results show that bans do not affect all groups or users equally, and pave the way to understanding the effect of bans across communities.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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