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 (i) strongly reduced user activity, (ii) slightly increased the diversity of the subreddits in which users participated, (iii) slightly reduced user toxicity, and (iv) led users to share less factual and more politically biased news. Importantly, we also find that interventions having strong community level effects also cause extreme and diversified user level reactions. Our results highlight that platform and 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.

翻译：评估温和干预的效果是一项极为重要的任务,因为它有助于评估内容调适过程的成功程度。到目前为止,干预效果几乎完全只在综合平台或社区一级进行评估。在这里,我们对针对Reddit的Donald Trump追随者团体“Donald Tonald”的节制干预顺序的用户影响进行了多层面评价。我们表明,这些干预措施(一) 大大降低了用户活动,(二) 略微增加了用户参与的子编辑的多样性,(三) 略微降低了用户的毒性,(四) 使用户分享的事实较少,而且政治上更偏颇。重要的是,我们还发现,具有强烈的社区一级效果的干预也引起了极端和多样化的用户反应。我们的结果突出表明,平台和社区一级的影响并不总是代表个人或较小的用户团体的基本行为。我们最后通过讨论我们的结果的实际和伦理影响。总体而言,我们的调查结果可以通报有针对性的温和干预的发展情况,并为维持在线平台提供有益的指导。