Kumar Bhargav Srinivasan
Lillian Lee
Skip Abstract Section
Abstract
Moderators of online communities often employ comment deletion as a tool. We ask here whether, beyond the positive effects of shielding a community from undesirable content, does comment removal actually cause the behavior of the comment's author to improve? We examine this question in a particularly well-moderated community, the ChangeMyView subreddit.
The standard analytic approach of interrupted time-series analysis unfortunately cannot answer this question of causality because it fails to distinguish the effect of having made a non-compliant comment from the effect of being subjected to moderator removal of that comment. We therefore leverage a "delayed feedback" approach based on the observation that some users may remain active between the time when they posted the non-compliant comment and the time when that comment is deleted. Applying this approach to such users, we reveal the causal role of comment deletion in reducing immediate noncompliance rates, although we do not find evidence of it having a causal role in inducing other behavior improvements. Our work thus empirically demonstrates both the promise and some potential limits of content removal as a positive moderation strategy, and points to future directions for identifying causal effects from observational data.
- June Ahn, Brian S. Butler, Cindy Weng, and Sarah Webster. 2013. Learning to Be a Better Q'Er in Social Q&A Sites: Social Norms and Information Artifacts. In Proceedings of the 76th ASIST Annual Meeting: Beyond the Cloud: Rethinking Information Boundaries (ASIST '13). American Society for Information Science, Silver Springs, MD, USA, Article 4, bibinfonumpages10 pages. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2655780.2655784Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Stevie Chancellor, Jessica Annette Pater, Trustin Clear, Eric Gilbert, and Munmun De Choudhury. 2016. #Thyghgapp: Instagram Content Moderation and Lexical Variation in Pro-Eating Disorder Communities. In Proceedings of CSCW (CSCW '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1201--1213. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819963Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Anirudh Srinivasan, Adam Glynn, Jacob Eisenstein, and Eric Gilbert. 2017. You Can'T Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit's 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech. In Proceedings of ACM Human Computer Interaction , Vol. 1, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Article 31 (2017), bibinfonumpages22 pages. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3134666Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Mattia Samory, Shagun Jhaver, Hunter Charvat, Amy Bruckman, Cliff Lampe, Jacob Eisenstein, and Eric Gilbert. 2018. The Internet's Hidden Rules: An Empirical Study of Reddit Norm Violations at Micro, Meso, and Macro Scales. In Proceedings of ACM Human Computer Interaction , Vol. 2, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Article 32 (Nov. 2018), bibinfonumpages25 pages. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3274301Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jonathan P. Chang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. 2019 a. Trajectories of Blocked Community Members: Redemption, Recidivism and Departure. In Proceedings of WWW. 184--195. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313638Google Scholar
- Jonathan P. Chang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. 2019 b. Trouble on the Horizon: Forecasting the Derailment of Online Conversations as they Develop. In Proceedings of EMNLP .Google Scholar
- Jilin Chen, Gary Hsieh, Jalal U. Mahmud, and Jeffrey Nichols. 2014. Understanding Individuals' Personal Values from Social Media Word Use. In Proceedings of CSCW (CSCW'14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 405--414. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2531602.2531608Google ScholarDigital Library
- Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec. 2014. How community feedback shapes user behavior. In Proceedings of ICWSM . https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM14/paper/view/8066Google Scholar
- Justin Cheng, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jure Leskovec. 2015. Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities. In Proceedings of International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media(ICWSM) . https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM15/paper/view/10469/10489Google Scholar
- Daejin Choi, Jinyoung Han, Taejoong Chung, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Byung-Gon Chun, and Ted Taekyoung Kwon. 2015. Characterizing Conversation Patterns in Reddit: From the Perspectives of Content Properties and User Participation Behaviors. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 233--243. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2817946.2817959Google ScholarDigital Library
- Robert B. Cialdini, Carl A. Kallgren, and Raymond R Reno. [n. d.]. A focus theory of normative conduct: A theoretical refinement and reevaluation of the role of norms in human behavior.Google Scholar
- Tiago Cunha, Ingmar Weber, and Gisele Pappa. 2017. A Warm Welcome Matters!: The Link Between Social Feedback and Weight Loss in /R/Loseit. In Proceedings of WWW Companion . 1063--1072. https://doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3055131Google ScholarDigital Library
- Casey Fiesler, Jialun Jiang, Joshua McCann, Kyle Frye, and Jed Brubaker. 2018. Reddit rules! Characterizing an Ecosystem of Governance. In Proceedings of International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media(ICWSM) . https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM18/paper/view/17898Google Scholar
- Antonio Gasparrini, Steven Cummins, and James Lopez Bernal. 2016. Interrupted time series regression for the evaluation of public health interventions: a tutorial . International Journal of Epidemiology , Vol. 46, 1 (06 2016), 348--355. https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyw098Google Scholar
- Hatebase. 2018. Hatebase . https://www.hatebase.org/. [Online; accessed 3-Nov-2018].Google Scholar
- Virgina Heffernan. 2018. Our best hope for civil discourse online is on ... Reddit . Wired (2018). https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-issue-reddit-change-my-view/Google Scholar
- Shagun Jhaver, Pranil Vora, and Amy Bruckman. 2017. Designing for civil conversations: lessons learned from ChangeMyView. Technical Report. Georgia Institute of Technology. https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/59080Google Scholar
- Shan Jiang and Christo Wilson. 2018. Linguistic Signals Under Misinformation and Fact-Checking: Evidence from User Comments on Social Media. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction , Vol. 2, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Article 82 (Nov. 2018), bibinfonumpages23 pages. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3274351Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andreas Kaltenbrunner, Vicencc Gó mez, Ayman Moghnieh, Rodrigo Meza, Josep Blat, and Vicente Ló pez. 2007. Homogeneous temporal activity patterns in a large online communication space. CoRR , Vol. abs/0708.1579 (2007). http://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1579Google Scholar
- Brian Keegan and Casey Fiesler. 2017. The Evolution and Consequences of Peer Producing Wikipedia's Rules. In Proceedings of ICWSM . https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15698Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sara Kiesler, Robert E. Kraut, Paul Resnick, and Aniket Kittur. 2011. Regulating behavior in online communities. MIT Press, Cambridge, 125--178. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhgvw.7Google Scholar
- Evangelos Kontopantelis, Tim Doran, David A Springate, Iain Buchan, and David Reeves. 2015. Regression based quasi-experimental approach when randomisation is not an option: interrupted time series analysis. BMJ , Vol. 350 (2015). https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h2750Google ScholarCross Ref
- Alex Leavitt and Joshua A. Clark. 2014. Upvoting hurricane Sandy: event-based news production processes on a social news site. In Proceedings of CHI. ACM, 1495--1504.Google Scholar
- Ping Liu, Joshua Guberman, Libby Hemphill, and Aron Culotta. 2018. Forecasting the presence and intensity of hostility on Instagram using linguistic and social features. In Proceedings of ICWSM.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Nathan Matias. 2019. Preventing harassment and increasing group participation through social norms in 2,190 online science discussions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Vol. 116, 20 (2019), 9785--9789.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jonathan T. Morgan and Anna Filippova. 2018. `Welcome' Changes?: Descriptive and Injunctive Norms in a Wikipedia Sub-Community. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction , Vol. 2, CSCW (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3274321Google Scholar
- Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral, and Sean J Taylor. 2013. Social influence bias: A randomized experiment. Science , Vol. 341, 6146 (2013), 647--651. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/341/6146/647Google Scholar
- Daniel S. Nagin, Francis T. Cullen, and Cheryl Lero Jonson (Eds.). 2018. Deterrence, choice, and crime: Contemporary perspectives .Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, New York, NY.Google Scholar
- Rishab Nithyanand, Brian Schaffner, and Phillipa Gill. 2017. Measuring Offensive Speech in Online Political Discourse. CoRR , Vol. abs/1706.01875 (2017). http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.01875Google Scholar
- Hüseyin Oktay, Brian J. Taylor, and David D. Jensen. 2010. Causal discovery in social media using quasi-experimental designs. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Social Media Analytics. ACM, 1--9.Google Scholar
- Ji Ho Park, Jamin Shin, and Pascale Fung. 2018. Reducing Gender Bias in Abusive Language Detection. In Proceedings of EMNLP. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D18--1302Google ScholarCross Ref
- Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Xiaochuang Han, and Jacob Eisenstein. 2018. Mind Your POV: Convergence of Articles and Editors Towards Wikipedia's Neutrality Norm. In Proceedings of ACM Human Computer Interaction , Vol. 2, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (2018). http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3274406Google ScholarDigital Library
- James W. Pennebaker, Roger J. Booth, and Martha E. Francis. 2007. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC): A computerized text analysis program. http://www.liwc.net/.Google Scholar
- Travis C. Pratt, Francis T. Cullen, Kristie R. Blevins, Leah E. Daigle, and Tamara D. Madensen. 2006. The Empirical Status of Deterrence Theory: A Meta-Analysis. In Taking stock: The status of criminological theory. Transaction Publishers, Piscataway, NJ, US, 367--395.Google Scholar
- Mattia Samory and Tanushree Mitra. 2018. Conspiracies Online: User Discussions in a Conspiracy Community Following Dramatic Events. In Proceedings of ICWSM . https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM18/paper/view/17907Google Scholar
- Maarten Sap, Dallas Card, Saadia Gabriel, Yejin Choi, and Noah A. Smith. 2019. The Risk of Racial Bias in Hate Speech Detection. In Proceedings of ACL .Google Scholar
- Joseph Seering, Robert Kraut, and Laura Dabbish. 2017. Shaping pro and anti-social behavior on Twitch through moderation and example-setting. In Proceedings of CSCW. ACM , New York, NY, USA. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2998181.2998277Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lawrence W. Sherman. 1993. Defiance, deterrence, and irrelevance: A theory of the criminal sanction. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency , Vol. 30, 4 (1993), 445--473. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022427893030004006 01245.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Chenhao Tan and Lillian Lee. 2015. All Who Wander: On the Prevalence and Characteristics of Multi-community Engagement. In Proceedings of WWW . https://doi.org/10.1145/2736277.2741661Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chenhao Tan, Vlad Niculae, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Lillian Lee. 2016. Winning arguments: Interaction dynamics and persuasion strategies in good-faith online discussions. In Proceedings of WWW . https://doi.org/10.1145/2872427.2883081Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tim Weninger, Xihao Avi Zhu, and Jiawei Han. 2013. An Exploration of Discussion Threads in Social News Sites: A Case Study of the Reddit Community. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 579--583.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michael Wiegand, Josef Ruppenhofer, and Thomas Kleinbauer. 2019. Detection of Abusive Language: the Problem of Biased Datasets. In Proceedings of NAACL .Google Scholar
- Justine Zhang, Jonathan P. Chang, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lucas Dixon, Yiqing Hua, Nithum Thain, and Dario Taraborelli. 2018. Conversations gone awry: Detecting early signs of conversational failure. In Proceedings of ACL . https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P18--1125Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Content Removal as a Moderation Strategy: Compliance and Other Outcomes in the ChangeMyView Community
Recommendations
Does Transparency in Moderation Really Matter?: User Behavior After Content Removal Explanations on Reddit
When posts are removed on a social media platform, users may or may not receive an explanation. What kinds of explanations are provided? Do those explanations matter? Using a sample of 32 million Reddit posts, we characterize the removal explanations ...
Towards Intersectional Moderation: An Alternative Model of Moderation Built on Care and Power
CSCWShortcomings of current models of moderation have driven policy makers, scholars, and technologists to speculate about alternative models of content moderation. While alternative models provide hope for the future of online spaces, they can fail without ...
Content Moderation and the Formation of Online Communities: A Theoretical Framework
WWW '24: Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024We study the impact of content moderation policies in online communities. In our theoretical model, a platform chooses a content moderation policy and individuals choose whether or not to participate in the community according to the fraction of user ...
Comments