Are Proactive Interventions for Reddit Communities Feasible?

Hussam Habib; Maaz Bin Musa; Muhammad Fareed Zaffar; Rishab Nithyanand

doi:10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19290

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Are Proactive Interventions for Reddit Communities Feasible?

Conference proceeding

Open access

Are Proactive Interventions for Reddit Communities Feasible?

Hussam Habib, Maaz Bin Musa, Muhammad Fareed Zaffar and Rishab Nithyanand

Proceedings of the ... International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Vol.16, pp.264-274

05/31/2022

DOI: 10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19290

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Abstract

Reddit has found its communities playing a prominent role in originating and propagating problematic sociopolitical discourse. 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) fear of backlash as a consequence of administrative decisions to ban or quarantine hateful communities. Consequently, administrative actions (community bans and quarantines) are often taken only when problematic discourse within a community spills over into the real world with serious consequences. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of deploying tools to proactively identify problematic communities on Reddit. Proactive identification strategies show promise for three reasons: (1) they have potential to reduce the manual efforts required to track communities for problematic content, (2) they give administrators a scientific rationale to back their decisions and interventions, and (3) they facilitate early and more nuanced interventions (than banning or quarantining) to mitigate problematic discourse.

Details

Title: Subtitle: Are Proactive Interventions for Reddit Communities Feasible?
Creators: Hussam Habib
Maaz Bin Musa
Muhammad Fareed Zaffar
Rishab Nithyanand
Resource Type: Conference proceeding
Publication Details: Proceedings of the ... International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Vol.16, pp.264-274
DOI: 10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19290
ISSN: 2162-3449
eISSN: 2334-0770
Language: English
Date published: 05/31/2022
Academic Unit: Center for Social Science Innovation; Computer Science; Public Policy Center (Archive); Law Faculty
Record Identifier: 9984353860202771

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