# Stranger Danger! Cross-Community Interactions with Fringe Users Increase the Growth of Fringe Communities on Reddit

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12186 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12186/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Fine-Tuning Pretrained Language Models: Weight Initializations, Data Orders, and Early Stopping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06305/) (2020)
- [The Pushshift Reddit Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08435/) (2020)
- [Fly-Swat or Cannon? Cost-Effective Language Model Choice via Meta-Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06077/) (2023)
- [Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00590/) (2020)
- [Community Identity and User Engagement in a Multi-Community Landscape](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09665/) (2017)
- [Control, Generate, Augment: A Scalable Framework for Multi-Attribute Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14983/) (2020)
- [Quarantined! Examining the Effects of a Community-Wide Moderation Intervention on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11483/) (2020)
- [Do Platform Migrations Compromise Content Moderation? Evidence from r/The_Donald and r/Incels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10397/) (2020)
- [Spillover of Antisocial Behavior from Fringe Platforms: The Unintended Consequences of Community Banning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09803/) (2022)
- [Adjusting for Confounders with Text: Challenges and an Empirical Evaluation Framework for Causal Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09961/) (2020)
- [Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06455/) (2022)
- [Pathways through Conspiracy: The Evolution of Conspiracy Radicalization through Engagement in Online Conspiracy Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10729/) (2022)
- [Understanding Online Migration Decisions Following the Banning of Radical Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04765/) (2022)
- [Why do people participate in small online communities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04282/) (2021)
- [Soros, Child Sacrifices, and 5G: Understanding the Spread of Conspiracy Theories on Web Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02187/) (2021)
- [Quantifying How Hateful Communities Radicalize Online Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08697/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Mental Health Impacts of AI Companions: Triangulating Social Media Quasi-Experiments, User Perspectives, and Relational Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22505/) (2025)
- [Estimating Causal Effects of Text Interventions Leveraging LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21474/) (2024)
- [Meat-Free Day Reduces Greenhouse Gas Emissions but Poses Challenges for Customer Retention and Adherence to Dietary Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02899/) (2025)
- [NutriTransform: Estimating Nutritional Information From Online Food Posts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04755/) (2025)
- [From Web(logs) to Web(AI): Questions, Platforms, and Methods across Twenty Editions of ICWSM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00205/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fringe communities promoting conspiracy theories and extremist ideologies have thrived on mainstream platforms, raising questions about the mechanisms driving their growth. Here, we hypothesize and study a possible mechanism: new members may be recruited through fringe-interactions: the exchange of comments between members and non-members of fringe communities. We apply text-based causal inference techniques to study the impact of fringe-interactions on the growth of three prominent fringe communities on Reddit: r/Incel, r/GenderCritical, and r/The_Donald. Our results indicate that fringe-interactions attract new members to fringe communities. Users who receive these interactions are up to 4.2 percentage points (pp) more likely to join fringe communities than similar, matched users who do not. This effect is influenced by 1) the characteristics of communities where the interaction happens (e.g., left vs. right-leaning communities) and 2) the language used in the interactions. Interactions using toxic language have a 5pp higher chance of attracting newcomers to fringe communities than non-toxic interactions. We find no effect when repeating this analysis by replacing fringe (r/Incel, r/GenderCritical, and r/The_Donald) with non-fringe communities (r/climatechange, r/NBA, r/leagueoflegends), suggesting this growth mechanism is specific to fringe communities. Overall, our findings suggest that curtailing fringe-interactions may reduce the growth of fringe communities on mainstream platforms.