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.

翻译：评估审核干预措施的效果是一项至关重要的任务，因为它有助于判断内容审核流程的成功与否。迄今为止，干预效果几乎完全是在平台或社区整体层面上进行评估。本文中，我们对针对r/The_Donald（Reddit上一个支持唐纳德·特朗普的社区）的一系列审核干预措施的用户级影响进行了多维度评估。我们证明了这些干预措施：1）显著降低了用户活跃度；2）略微增加了用户参与的子版块多样性；3）略微降低了用户的有害性言论程度；4）导致用户更倾向于分享事实性较弱且政治倾向更强的新闻。重要的是，我们还发现具有强社区级效果的干预措施与极端且多样化的用户级反应相关联。我们的结果表明，社区层面的效果并不总能代表个体或较小用户群体的潜在行为。最后，我们讨论了研究结果在实践和伦理方面的含义。总体而言，我们的发现可为制定有针对性的审核干预措施提供参考，并为在线平台的监管提供有益指导。