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Study Finds Banning Reddit's Bigoted Jerkwards Worked

In recent years, Reddit has banned a bevy of far-right troll havens, including its board for the white supremacist “alt-right” and others used for the harassment of women, minorities and other people. The bans were a reversal of Reddit’s prior policy to not ban “questionable” content—and drew predictable outrage, given that its policy of non-intervention had fostered an explosion of very active fringe communities, many of them far to the right or openly racist.

gizmodo.com|Tom McKay

In recent years, Reddit has banned a bevy of far-right troll havens, including its board for the white supremacist “alt-right” and others used for the harassment of women, minorities and other people. The bans were a reversal of Reddit’s prior policy to not ban “questionable” content—and drew predictable outrage, given that its policy of non-intervention had fostered an explosion of very active fringe communities, many of them far to the right or openly racist.

Members of the banned communities portrayed themselves as martyrs, while a slew of other Redditors argued either a free speech ethos requires tolerating hate speech or that the ban wouldn’t work.

But a new study from Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University and University of Michigan researchers suggests there’s little ambiguity: Banning horrible communities from taking root on Reddit worked.

“For the banned community users that remained active, the ban drastically reduced the amount of hate speech they used across Reddit by a large and significant amount. Following the ban, Reddit saw a 90.63% decrease in the usage of manually filtered hate words by r/fatpeoplehate users, and a 81.08% decrease in the usage of manually filtered hate words by r/CoonTown users (relative to their respective control groups). The observed changes in hate speech usage were verified to be caused by the ban and not random chance, via permutation tests.”