You Can't Stay Here

TLDR

In 2015 Reddit shut down r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown for violating its anti‑harassment policy, but the impact of such bans on hateful behavior remains uncertain. This study examines how the bans affected both the users who left or stayed and the broader subreddit ecosystem. Using over 100 million Reddit posts and comments, the authors built hate‑speech lexicons and applied causal‑inference techniques to track changes in hate‑speech usage. The bans led to many accounts abandoning the platform and a more than 80 % drop in hate‑speech among remaining users, while other subreddits did not experience a corresponding rise in hateful content, indicating the bans were largely effective.

Abstract

In 2015, Reddit closed several subreddits-foremost among them r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown-due to violations of Reddit's anti-harassment policy. However, the effectiveness of banning as a moderation approach remains unclear: banning might diminish hateful behavior, or it may relocate such behavior to different parts of the site. We study the ban of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown in terms of its effect on both participating users and affected subreddits. Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage-by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown "migrants," those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage. In other words, other subreddits did not inherit the problem. We conclude by reflecting on the apparent success of the ban, discussing implications for online moderation, Reddit and internet communities more broadly.