research-article

Public Access

Content Removal as a Moderation Strategy: Compliance and Other Outcomes in the ChangeMyView Community

Authors:

Kumar Bhargav Srinivasan,

Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil,

Chenhao TanAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW

Article No.: 163, Pages 1 - 21

https://doi.org/10.1145/3359265

Published: 07 November 2019 Publication History

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.

References

[1]

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=2655780.2655784

Digital Library

[2]

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/10.1145/2818048.2819963

Digital Library

[3]

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/10.1145/3134666

Digital Library

[4]

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/10.1145/3274301

Digital Library

[5]

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/10.1145/3308558.3313638

[6]

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 .

[7]

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/10.1145/2531602.2531608

Digital Library

[8]

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/8066

[9]

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/10469/10489

[10]

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/10.1145/2817946.2817959

Digital Library

[11]

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.

[12]

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/10.1145/3041021.3055131

Digital Library

[13]

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/17898

[14]

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/dyw098

[15]

Hatebase. 2018. Hatebase . https://www.hatebase.org/. [Online; accessed 3-Nov-2018].

[16]

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/

[17]

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/1853/59080

[18]

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/10.1145/3274351

Digital Library

[19]

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/0708.1579

[20]

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/15698

[21]

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.7

[22]

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.h2750

[23]

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.

[24]

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.

[25]

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.

[26]

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/10.1145/3274321

[27]

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/341/6146/647

[28]

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.

[29]

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/1706.01875

[30]

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.

[31]

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--1302

[32]

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/10.1145/3274406

Digital Library

[33]

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/.

[34]

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.

[35]

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/17907

[36]

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 .

[37]

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/10.1145/2998181.2998277

Digital Library

[38]

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.

[39]

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/10.1145/2736277.2741661

Digital Library

[40]

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/10.1145/2872427.2883081

Digital Library

[41]

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.

Digital Library

[42]

Michael Wiegand, Josef Ruppenhofer, and Thomas Kleinbauer. 2019. Detection of Abusive Language: the Problem of Biased Datasets. In Proceedings of NAACL .

[43]

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--1125

Cited By

Kocielnik RLi ZKann CSambrano DMorrier JLinegar MTaylor CKim MNaqvie NSoltani FDehpanah ACahill GAnandkumar AAlvarez R(2024)Challenges in moderating disruptive player behavior in online competitive action gamesFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2024.12837356Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2024.1283735
Bulat BWang HFujimoto SFrey S(2024)The psychology of volunteer moderators: Tradeoffs between participation, belonging, and norms in online community governanceNew Media & Society10.1177/14614448241259028Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241259028
Foriest JMittal SBray KTran ADe Choudhury M(2024)A Cross Community Comparison of Muting in Conversations of Gendered Violence on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869408:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686940
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Content Removal as a Moderation Strategy: Compliance and Other Outcomes in the ChangeMyView Community
1. Applied computing
  1. Law, social and behavioral sciences

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 ...
Content Moderation and the Formation of Online Communities: A Theoretical Framework
WWW '24: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024

We 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 ...
A Trade-off-centered Framework of Content Moderation
Content moderation research typically prioritizes representing and addressing challenges for one group of stakeholders or communities in one type of context. While taking a focused approach is reasonable or even favorable for empirical case studies, it ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 3, Issue CSCW

November 2019

5026 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3371885

Editors:
Airi Lampinen
Stockholm University, Sweden
,
Darren Gergle
Northwestern University, USA
,
David A. Shamma
FXPAL, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 November 2019

Published in PACMHCI Volume 3, Issue CSCW

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

NSF

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

44
Total Citations
View Citations
1,444
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)345
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)43

Reflects downloads up to 23 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Kocielnik RLi ZKann CSambrano DMorrier JLinegar MTaylor CKim MNaqvie NSoltani FDehpanah ACahill GAnandkumar AAlvarez R(2024)Challenges in moderating disruptive player behavior in online competitive action gamesFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2024.12837356Online publication date: 23-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2024.1283735
Bulat BWang HFujimoto SFrey S(2024)The psychology of volunteer moderators: Tradeoffs between participation, belonging, and norms in online community governanceNew Media & Society10.1177/14614448241259028Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241259028
Foriest JMittal SBray KTran ADe Choudhury M(2024)A Cross Community Comparison of Muting in Conversations of Gendered Violence on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869408:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686940
Lambert CChoi FChandrasekharan E(2024)"Positive reinforcement helps breed positive behavior": Moderator Perspectives on Encouraging Desirable BehaviorProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869298:CSCW2(1-33)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686929
Ma RZhang ZGui XKou Y(2024)Labeling in the Dark: Exploring Content Creators’ and Consumers’ Experiences with Content Classification for Child Safety on YouTubeProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3661565(1518-1532)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643834.3661565
McKay DMakri SBuchanan G(2024)[citation needed]: An Examination of Types and Purpose of Evidence Provided in Three Online Discussions on RedditProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638321(219-230)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627508.3638321
Atcheson AKoshy VKarahalios K(2024)Not What it Used to Be: Characterizing Content and User-base Changes in Newly Created Online CommunitiesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642769(1-12)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642769
Schaffner BBhagoji ACheng SMei JShen JWang GChetty MFeamster NLakier GTan C(2024)"Community Guidelines Make this the Best Party on the Internet": An In-Depth Study of Online Platforms' Content Moderation PoliciesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642333(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642333
Grüning DKamin JPanizza FKatsaros MLorenz-Spreen P(2024)A framework for promoting online prosocial behavior via digital interventionsCommunications Psychology10.1038/s44271-023-00052-72:1Online publication date: 11-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00052-7
Chen QCai JJacucci G(2024)“People are Way too Obsessed with Rank”: Trust System in Social Virtual RealityComputer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)10.1007/s10606-024-09498-7Online publication date: 4-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-024-09498-7
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents