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 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, with 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.

Bridging Echo Chambers? Understanding Political Partisanship through Semantic Network Analysis

“…Finally, we considered the relative popularity within the scientific literature of different subreddits. While many prior studies have evaluated discussions on conservative subreddits such as r/The Donald (Rieger et al, 2021; Trujillo & Cresci, 2022), few have evaluated subreddits that explicitly tie themselves to the two major political parties. The distinction may produce differences; for example, party membership may change the perception of the “in-group” toward an “out-group.”…”

Temporal Dynamics of Coordinated Online Behavior: Stability, Archetypes, and Influence

“…This archetype straightforwardly emerges from Figure 7 and the above discussion. The analysis of stationary users is relevant because their behavior could imply that they are strong supporters and core members of their CC (Trujillo and Cresci 2022). Figure 10 shows the proportion of stationary users, as well as of the users of the remaining archetypes, in the CCs.…”

“…RBO is a probabilistic measure of similarity based on the overlap between two rankings, which can handle tied ranks and rankings of different lengths, as in our case. Furthermore, it has a bias component that favors (i.e., weights more) overlaps between top items in the rankings (Trujillo and Cresci 2022). Once computed the RBO scores, we compare the CC to which each stationary user belongs with that to which it is mostly similar, as shown in Figure 11.…”

Trust and Safety on Social Media: Understanding the Impact of Anti-Social Behavior and Misinformation on Content Moderation and Platform Governance

“…For example, Twitter tested (with some success) a feature that prompted users to reconsider their messages if they were potentially harmful (Katsaros et al, 2022). Other platforms, such as Reddit, rely more on community-led moderation and use jargon-free community rules to promote “healthier” conversations by enhancing civility and other pro-social behaviors (e.g., Del Valle et al, 2020; Trujillo & Cresci, 2022).…”