Who, Why, and How: Disentangling the Effects of Moderation Source, Context, and Language on Post-Removal Behavior

TL;DR

This study analyzes how moderation source, context, and language influence user behavior on Reddit, revealing that bot moderation increases compliance, while institutional moderation induces more self-censorship, with linguistic strategies varying by violation severity.

Contribution

It introduces a large-scale observational analysis of moderation effects, highlighting the importance of context and language in shaping post-moderation user behavior.

Findings

Bot moderation leads to higher compliance and lower self-censorship.

Institutional moderation causes the strongest self-censorship effects.

Linguistic strategies' effectiveness varies with violation severity.

Abstract

Content moderation is a central mechanism through which platforms attempt to balance user engagement with community governance. Yet existing research has largely treated moderation as a uniform intervention, overlooking how moderator source, violation context, and linguistic style jointly shape user behavior. Drawing on the Human--AI Interaction Theory of Interactive Media Effects (HAII-TIME), this study examines how these three dimensions produce divergent post-moderation behavioral trajectories in a large-scale observational dataset of 11,795,036 moderation events across 9,285,410 users and 61,261 subreddits on Reddit (2021--2025). Using probabilistic behavioral classification, ANOVA, and OLS regression with PCA-derived linguistic features, we find that bot moderation consistently produces higher compliance and lower self-censorship than human or modteam moderation, challenging the assumption that human agency cues are inherently advantageous. Modteam moderation produces the strongest self-censorship effects, suggesting that institutional depersonalization is a meaningful driver of behavioral withdrawal. Violation severity emerges as a critical contingency: linguistic strategies effective in routine contexts -- elaborated explanation, community-scale appeals, direct personal address -- can backfire for serious violations, whereas prosocially framed and emotionally emphatic messages become most effective when stakes are highest. Of 480 linguistic interactions tested, 33 survive FDR correction. These findings extend HAII-TIME by introducing violation salience as a moderator of cue-based processing, and offer empirical grounding for context-adaptive moderation design.