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We study the effect of the number of users on the activity of communities within the online content sharing and discussion platform Reddit, called subreddits. We found that comment activity on Reddit has a heavy-tailed distribution, where a…
Community rules play a key part in enabling or constraining the behaviors of members in online communities. However, little is unknown regarding whether and to what degree changing rules actually affects community dynamics. In this paper,…
Millions of online communities are governed by volunteer moderators, who shape their communities by setting and enforcing rules, recruiting additional moderators, and participating in the community themselves. These moderators must…
Rules are a critical component of the functioning of nearly every online community, yet it is challenging for community moderators to make data-driven decisions about what rules to set for their communities. The connection between a…
Developing a strong community requires empowered leadership capable of overcoming governance challenges. New online platforms have given users opportunities to practice governance through content moderation roles. The over 2.8 million…
As more people flock to social media to connect with others and form virtual communities, it is important to research how members of these groups interact to understand human behavior on the Web. In response to an increase in hate speech,…
Making online social communities 'better' is a challenging undertaking, as online communities are extraordinarily varied in their size, topical focus, and governance. As such, what is valued by one community may not be valued by another.…
A major task for moderators of online spaces is norm-setting, essentially creating shared norms for user behavior in their communities. Platform design principles emphasize the importance of highlighting norm-adhering examples and…
Online social media platforms use automated moderation systems to remove or reduce the visibility of rule-breaking content. While previous work has documented the importance of manual content moderation, the effects of automated content…
Millions of people use online social networks to reinforce their sense of belonging, for example by giving and asking for feedback as a form of social validation and self-recognition. It is common to observe disagreement among people…
How are Reddit communities responding to AI-generated content? We explored this question through a large-scale analysis of subreddit community rules and their change over time. We collected the metadata and community rules for over…
Content moderation is a widely used strategy to prevent the dissemination of irregular information on social media platforms. Despite extensive research on developing automated models to support decision-making in content moderation, there…
Social media are shifting towards pluralism -- community-governed platforms where groups define their own norms. What violates rules in one community may be perfectly acceptable in another. Can AI models help moderate such pluralistic…
Platforms are increasingly relying on algorithms to curate the content within users' social media feeds. However, the growing prominence of proprietary, algorithmically curated feeds has concealed what factors influence the presentation of…
An increasing amount of attention has been devoted to the problem of "toxic" or antisocial behavior on social media. In this paper we analyze such behavior at very large scales: we analyze toxicity over a 14-year time span on nearly 500…
Reddit administrators have generally struggled to prevent or contain such discourse for several reasons including: (1) the inability for a handful of human administrators to track and react to millions of posts and comments per day and (2)…
With increasing attention to online anti-social behaviors such as personal attacks and bigotry, it is critical to have an accurate accounting of how widespread anti-social behaviors are. In this paper, we empirically measure the prevalence…
Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content.…
The proliferation of social media platforms has afforded social scientists unprecedented access to vast troves of data on human interactions, facilitating the study of online behavior at an unparalleled scale. These platforms typically…
Reddit has found its communities playing a prominent role in originating and propagating problematic socio-political discourse. Reddit administrators have generally struggled to prevent or contain such discourse for several reasons…