Are Proactive Interventions for Reddit Communities Feasible?
Hussam Habib, Maaz Bin Musa, Fareed Zaffar, Rishab Nithyanand

TL;DR
This paper explores the potential of proactive tools to identify problematic Reddit communities early, aiming to assist administrators in mitigating harmful socio-political discourse more effectively and with less manual effort.
Contribution
It evaluates the feasibility of proactive identification strategies for problematic communities on Reddit, providing a scientific basis for early interventions.
Findings
Proactive strategies can reduce manual monitoring efforts.
They offer a scientific rationale for intervention decisions.
Early interventions can be more nuanced than bans or quarantines.
Abstract
Reddit has found its communities playing a prominent role in originating and propagating problematic socio-political discourse. Reddit administrators have generally struggled to prevent or contain such discourse for several reasons including: (1) the inability for a handful of human administrators to track and react to millions of posts and comments per day and (2) fear of backlash as a consequence of administrative decisions to ban or quarantine hateful communities. Consequently, administrative actions (community bans and quarantines) are often taken only when problematic discourse within a community spills over into the real world with serious consequences. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of deploying tools to proactively identify problematic communities on Reddit. Proactive identification strategies show promise for three reasons: (1) they have potential to reduce the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsHate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Topic Modeling
