You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech

For the definition of “work” framed by our research questions, the ban worked for Reddit. It succeeded at both a user-level and a community-level. Through the banning of subreddits which engaged in racism and fat-shaming, Reddit was able to reduce the prevalence of such behavior on the site. The amount of hate speech generated across Reddit by r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown users went down drastically following the ban. By shutting down these echo chambers of hate, Reddit caused the people participating to either leave the site or dramatically change their linguistic behavior (as measured via our hate lexicons). At a community-level, the ban also worked. The subreddits that inherited the activity of former r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown users did not inherit their previous behavior. We examined users’ hate speech usage post-ban in new subreddits — hate speech previously largely confined to these two banned subreddits. When controlling for general trends in hate speech usage across Reddit, we found that the ban had no effect on the hate speech usage in subreddits invaded by migrants from r/fatpeoplehate.