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 within and without the subreddit. We find that the interventions had strong positive effects toward reducing the activity of problematic users both inside and outside of r/The_Donald. However, the interventions also caused an increase in toxicity and led users to share more polarized and less factual news. Additional findings of our study are that the restriction had stronger effects than the quarantine and that core users of r/The_Donald suffered stronger effects than the other 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 by discussing implications for the design and deployment of moderation interventions.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; • Information systems → Social networks; Social networking sites.

(Re)shaping online narratives: when bots promote the message of President Trump during his first impeachment

“…Since social media platforms are key drivers of traffic towards far-right websites (together with search engines) ( Chen et al, 2022 ), it is important to note that many of the links towards such websites are made available to the public through bots. Although our findings may point to the automatic removal of bots from political debates as a possible intervention ( Cantini et al, 2022 ), there is evidence that attempts at moderating content can lead to even greater polarization ( Trujillo & Cresci, 2022 ), hence the need for caution when intervening.…”

Personalized Interventions for Online Moderation

“…Theories from the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences support these empirical results [7] and posit that the efficacy of interventions depends on individual and contextual characteristics [27]. In line with this literature, but in contrast to the platforms' objectives, the interventions recently applied by Twitter and Reddit against toxic users caused a subset of users to become even more toxic and radicalized [11,15,24].…”

“…As a recent example, when Twitter sent warning messages to dissuade users from posting toxic tweets, all users received the exact same message [15]. However, results on user reactions to moderation interventions showed that different users react in different ways to the same intervention, according to their individual characteristics [22,24]. Theories from the social, psychological, and behavioral sciences support these empirical results [7] and posit that the efficacy of interventions depends on individual and contextual characteristics [27].…”

“…For example, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram attached warning labels to disputed posts [28] and banned users, groups, and pages that misbehaved [13]. Pinterest blocked search results for anti-vaccination queries and Reddit quarantined and banned toxic communities [11,22,24]. However, despite appearing as reasonable solutions and serving as public evidence of the platforms' willingness to tackle the issues they contributed to create, these interventions Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.…”

“…were designed and applied light-mindedly. Recent studies measured limited or no effects at all [3,11,24], and showed that some interventions even exacerbated the very issues they aimed to solve [1,6,21,29]. Overall, the design of moderation interventions received limited scholarly attention and progress was sought by trial-and-error rather than by a rigorous scientific approach.…”