One of Many: Assessing User-level Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald

TL;DR

This study evaluates the user-level effects of moderation interventions on r/The_Donald, revealing significant reductions in activity, slight increases in diversity, and shifts in content quality, with implications for moderation strategies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed, multidimensional analysis of how moderation interventions impact individual users, a perspective often overlooked in platform-level evaluations.

Findings

User activity was strongly reduced by interventions.

Participation in diverse subreddits slightly increased.

User toxicity was slightly reduced.

Abstract

Evaluating the effects of moderation interventions is a task of paramount importance, as it allows assessing the success of content moderation processes. So far, intervention effects have been almost solely evaluated at the aggregated platform or community levels. Here, we carry out a multidimensional evaluation of the user-level effects of the sequence of moderation interventions that targeted r/The_Donald: a community of Donald Trump adherents on Reddit. We demonstrate that the interventions: 1) strongly reduced user activity; 2) slightly increased the diversity of the subreddits in which users participated; 3) slightly reduced user toxicity; and 4) gave way to the sharing of less factual and more politically biased news. Importantly, we also find that interventions having strong community level effects are associated to extreme and diversified user-level reactions. Our results highlight that community-level effects are not always representative of the underlying behavior of individuals or smaller user groups. We conclude by discussing the practical and ethical implications of our results. Overall, our findings can inform the development of targeted moderation interventions and provide useful guidance for policing online platforms.