# One of Many: Assessing User-level Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.08809 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08809/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [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)
- [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)

Evaluating the effects of moderation interventions is a task of paramount importance, as it allows assessing the success of content moderation processes. So far, intervention effects have been almost solely evaluated at the aggregated platform or community levels. Here, we carry out a multidimensional evaluation of the user-level effects of the sequence of moderation interventions that targeted r/The_Donald: a community of Donald Trump adherents on Reddit. We demonstrate that the interventions: 1) strongly reduced user activity; 2) slightly increased the diversity of the subreddits in which users participated; 3) slightly reduced user toxicity; and 4) gave way to the sharing of less factual and more politically biased news. Importantly, we also find that interventions having strong community level effects are associated to extreme and diversified user-level reactions. Our results highlight that community-level effects are not always representative of the underlying behavior of individuals or smaller user groups. We conclude by discussing the practical and ethical implications of our results. Overall, our findings can inform the development of targeted moderation interventions and provide useful guidance for policing online platforms.