# Quarantined! Examining the Effects of a Community-Wide Moderation Intervention on Reddit

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11483 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11483/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [On the Evolution of (Hateful) Memes by Means of Multimodal Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06573/) (2022)
- ["Humans welcome to observe": A First Look at the Agent Social Network Moltbook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10127/) (2026)
- [Contextualized Counterspeech: Strategies for Adaptation, Personalization, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07338/) (2024)
- [The DSA Transparency Database: Auditing Self-reported Moderation Actions by Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10269/) (2023)
- [Stranger Danger! Cross-Community Interactions with Fringe Users Increase the Growth of Fringe Communities on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12186/) (2023)
- [Safeguarding Decentralized Social Media: LLM Agents for Automating Community Rule Compliance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08963/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Online Hate Speech through the Causal Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08120/) (2021)
- [Personalized Interventions for Online Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09462/) (2022)
- [Quantifying How Hateful Communities Radicalize Online Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08697/) (2022)
- [A Deeper (Autoregressive) Approach to Non-Convergent Discourse Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12510/) (2023)
- [The Collective Turing Test: Large Language Models Can Generate Realistic Multi-User Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08592/) (2025)
- [Hate speech, Censorship, and Freedom of Speech: The Changing Policies of Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09673/) (2022)
- [Queuing for Civility: Regulating Emotions and Reducing Toxicity in Digital Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00696/) (2025)
- [Quantifying Feature Importance for Online Content Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19882/) (2025)
- [Algorithmic Cultivation: How Social Media Feeds Shape User Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.17010/) (2026)
- [Contextualized Counterspeech Can Be More Persuasive Than Generic Counterspeech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26236/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Should social media platforms override a community's self-policing when it repeatedly break rules? What actions can they consider? In light of this debate, platforms have begun experimenting with softer alternatives to outright bans. We examine one such intervention called quarantining, that impedes direct access to and promotion of controversial communities. Specifically, we present two case studies of what happened when Reddit quarantined the influential communities r/TheRedPill (TRP) and r/The_Donald (TD). Using over 85M Reddit posts, we apply causal inference methods to examine the quarantine's effects on TRP and TD. We find that the quarantine made it more difficult to recruit new members: new user influx to TRP and TD decreased by 79.5% and 58%, respectively. Despite quarantining, existing users' misogyny and racism levels remained unaffected. We conclude by reflecting on the effectiveness of this design friction in limiting the influence of toxic communities and discuss broader implications for content moderation.