DeepAI AI Chat
Log In Sign Up

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

09/19/2022
by   Amaury Trujillo, et al.
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
0

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 (i) strongly reduced user activity, (ii) slightly increased the diversity of the subreddits in which users participated, (iii) slightly reduced user toxicity, and (iv) led users to share less factual and more politically biased news. Importantly, we also find that interventions having strong community level effects also cause extreme and diversified user level reactions. Our results highlight that platform and 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.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

01/17/2022

Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald

The subreddit r/The_Donald was repeatedly denounced as a toxic and misbe...
03/04/2021

An Agent-based Model to Evaluate Interventions on Online Dating Platforms to Decrease Racial Homogamy

Perhaps the most controversial questions in the study of online platform...
01/27/2021

Not Now, Ask Later: Users Weaken Their Behavior Change Regimen Over Time, But Expect To Re-Strengthen It Imminently

How effectively do we adhere to nudges and interventions that help us co...
06/02/2021

Ethical-Advice Taker: Do Language Models Understand Natural Language Interventions?

Is it possible to use natural language to intervene in a model's behavio...
11/21/2018

Network Abstractions of Prescription Patterns in a Medicaid Population

Understanding prescription patterns have relied largely on aggregate sta...