# Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.06455 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06455/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Contextualized Counterspeech: Strategies for Adaptation, Personalization, and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07338/) (2024)
- [Spillover of Antisocial Behavior from Fringe Platforms: The Unintended Consequences of Community Banning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09803/) (2022)
- [The DSA Transparency Database: Auditing Self-reported Moderation Actions by Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10269/) (2023)
- [Evaluation and Facilitation of Online Discussions in the LLM Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01513/) (2025)
- [Temporal Dynamics of Coordinated Online Behavior: Stability, Archetypes, and Influence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06774/) (2023)
- [Stranger Danger! Cross-Community Interactions with Fringe Users Increase the Growth of Fringe Communities on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12186/) (2023)
- [Personalized Interventions for Online Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09462/) (2022)
- [Designing Synthetic Discussion Generation Systems: A Case Study for Online Facilitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16505/) (2025)
- [The Collective Turing Test: Large Language Models Can Generate Realistic Multi-User Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08592/) (2025)
- [To Facilitate or not to Facilitate: Human and LLM Facilitator Tendencies in Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.28643/) (2026)
- [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)
- [Contextualized Counterspeech Can Be More Persuasive Than Generic Counterspeech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26236/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The subreddit r/The_Donald was repeatedly denounced as a toxic and misbehaving online community, reasons for which it faced a sequence of increasingly constraining moderation interventions by Reddit administrators. It was quarantined in June 2019, restricted in February 2020, and finally banned in June 2020, but despite precursory work on the matter, the effects of this sequence of interventions are still unclear. In this work, we follow a multidimensional causal inference approach to study data containing more than 15M posts made in a time frame of 2 years, to examine the effects of such interventions inside and outside of the subreddit. We find that the interventions greatly reduced the activity of problematic users. However, the interventions also caused an increase in toxicity and led users to share more polarized and less factual news. In addition, the restriction had stronger effects than the quarantine, and core users of r/The_Donald suffered stronger effects than the rest of users. Overall, our results provide evidence that the interventions had mixed effects and paint a nuanced picture of the consequences of community-level moderation strategies. We conclude by reflecting on the challenges of policing online platforms and on the implications for the design and deployment of moderation interventions.