Taming Toxicity or Fueling It? The Great Ban`s Role in Shifting Toxic User Behavior and Engagement
| Autor: | Cima, Lorenzo, Tessa, Benedetta, Cresci, Stefano, Trujillo, Amaury, Avvenuti, Marco |
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| Rok vydání: | 2024 |
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| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| Popis: | In today's online environments users experience harm and abuse on a daily basis. Therefore, content moderation is crucial to ensure their safety and well-being. However, the effectiveness of many moderation interventions is still uncertain. We evaluate the effectiveness of The Great Ban, one of the largest deplatforming interventions carried out by Reddit that affected almost 2,000 communities. We analyze 53M comments shared by nearly 34K users, providing in-depth results on both the intended and unintended consequences of this ban. We found that 15.6% of the moderated users abandoned the platform while the remaining ones decreased their overall toxicity by 4.1%. Nonetheless, a subset of those users increased their toxicity by 70% after the intervention. In any case, increases in toxicity did not lead to marked increases in activity or engagement, meaning that the most toxic users had overall a limited impact. Our findings bring to light new insights on the effectiveness of deplatforming. Furthermore, they also contribute to informing future content moderation strategies. Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2401.11254 This work is an extension of this conference paper: Cima, L., Trujillo, A., Avvenuti, M., & Cresci, S. (2024, May). The Great Ban: Efficacy and Unintended Consequences of a Massive Deplatforming Operation on Reddit. In Companion Publication of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference (pp. 85-93) |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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