# Content Removal as a Moderation Strategy: Compliance and Other Outcomes in the ChangeMyView Community

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09563 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09563/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Human-AI Collaboration via Conditional Delegation: A Case Study of Content Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11788/) (2022)
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- [Proactive Moderation of Online Discussions: Existing Practices and the Potential for Algorithmic Support](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16525/) (2022)
- [Can Language Model Moderators Improve the Health of Online Discourse?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10781/) (2023)
- [Seamlessly Integrating Factual Information and Social Content with Persuasive Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07657/) (2022)
- [Thread With Caution: Proactively Helping Users Assess and Deescalate Tension in Their Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01401/) (2022)
- [Exploiting Explainability to Design Adversarial Attacks and Evaluate Attack Resilience in Hate-Speech Detection Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18585/) (2023)
- [Dimensions of Online Conflict: Towards Modeling Agonism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03584/) (2023)
- [Context-Aware Toxicity Detection in Multiplayer Games: Integrating Domain-Adaptive Pretraining and Match Metadata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01534/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Moderators of online communities often employ comment deletion as a tool. We ask here whether, beyond the positive effects of shielding a community from undesirable content, does comment removal actually cause the behavior of the comment's author to improve? We examine this question in a particularly well-moderated community, the ChangeMyView subreddit. The standard analytic approach of interrupted time-series analysis unfortunately cannot answer this question of causality because it fails to distinguish the effect of having made a non-compliant comment from the effect of being subjected to moderator removal of that comment. We therefore leverage a "delayed feedback" approach based on the observation that some users may remain active between the time when they posted the non-compliant comment and the time when that comment is deleted. Applying this approach to such users, we reveal the causal role of comment deletion in reducing immediate noncompliance rates, although we do not find evidence of it having a causal role in inducing other behavior improvements. Our work thus empirically demonstrates both the promise and some potential limits of content removal as a positive moderation strategy, and points to future directions for identifying causal effects from observational data.