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Abstract

When toxic online communities on mainstream platforms face moderation
measures, such as bans, they may migrate to other platforms with laxer policies
or set up their own dedicated website. Previous work suggests that, within
mainstream platforms, community-level moderation is effective in mitigating the
harm caused by the moderated communities. It is, however, unclear whether these
results also hold when considering the broader Web ecosystem. Do toxic
communities continue to grow in terms of user base and activity on their new
platforms? Do their members become more toxic and ideologically radicalized? In
this paper, we report the results of a large-scale observational study of how
problematic online communities progress following community-level moderation
measures. We analyze data from r/The_Donald} and r/Incels, two communities that
were banned from Reddit and subsequently migrated to their own standalone
websites. Our results suggest that, in both cases, moderation measures
significantly decreased posting activity on the new platform, reducing the
number of posts, active users, and newcomers. In spite of that, users in one of
the studied communities (r/The_Donald) showed increases in signals associated
with toxicity and radicalization, which justifies concerns that the reduction
in activity may come at the expense of a more toxic and radical community.
Overall, our results paint a nuanced portrait of the consequences of
community-level moderation and can inform their design and deployment.