You Can't Stay Here

Abstract

In 2015, Reddit closed several subreddits-foremost among them r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown-due to violations of Reddit's anti-harassment policy. However, the effectiveness of banning as a moderation approach remains unclear: banning might diminish hateful behavior, or it may relocate such behavior to different parts of the site. We study the ban of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown in terms of its effect on both participating users and affected subreddits. Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage-by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown "migrants," those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage. In other words, other subreddits did not inherit the problem. We conclude by reflecting on the apparent success of the ban, discussing implications for online moderation, Reddit and internet communities more broadly.

Hateful People or Hateful Bots?

“…The topic of understanding online human behavior has been of a great interest to CSCW/HCI researchers in various contexts such as mental health [19,23], political polarization [11,35], and abusive social behaviors [13,50]. Our findings challenge the assumption often made by such studies that online social media content is always created by humans.…”

Mind Your POV

“…A study on Slashdot -a popular website with a good amount of moderation -found that users come to a consensus about the community's moderation policies and such moderation practices enable large scale civil participation [53]. Reddit's decision to ban hate communities resulted in a reduction of abusive language [16]. An analysis of different moderation styles in online health support communities found that positive and rewarding moderation styles are more effective than negative and punishing styles [58].…”

“…We use these nine lexicons in addition to the words from Wikipedia manual. 16 A list of all the lexicons we used is shown in Table 1 with a description, sources, and example terms. To characterize the amount of biased language in a text, we compute the coverage of each lexicon words per token in the text.…”

“…To answer them, we apply the Interrupted Time Series technique for causal inference [8]. This method has been used in recent studies on hate speech [16] and conspiratorial discussions [57]. Interrupted Time Series analysis is a quasi-experimental design that can be used to evaluate the longitudinal effects of an intervention (i.e., treatment), through segmented regression modeling.…”

“…We limit our analysis only to lexicon, while syntax, semantics, and pragmatic measures could also be studied 16. Note that Recasens et al[67] used a bias lexicon created from the NPOV articles.…”