It seems like just the other day that Reddit finally banned a handful of its most hateful and deplorable subreddits, including r/coontown and r/fatpeoplehate. The move was, at the time, derided by some as pointless, akin to shooing criminals away from one neighborhood only to trouble another. But a new study shows that, for Reddit at least, it has had lasting positive effects.
The policing of hate speech online has become a flash point for many a flame war, these past few months especially, as white nationalists, neo-nazis and others with abhorrent but strictly speaking quite legal viewpoints struggle with being banned repeatedly from the internets biggest platforms.
The practice has led sites like StormFront to seek shelter at dismal ports like off-brand hosts and small social networks pitching their tolerance of certain types of free speech being censored by others. Its an example of one of the objections made to the idea of banning troublesome users or communities: theyll just go elsewhere, so why bother?
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology took this question seriously, as until someone actually investigates whether such bans are helpful, harmful or some mix thereof, its all speculation. So they took a major corpus of Reddit data (compiled by PushShift.io) and examined exactly what happened to the hate speech and purveyors thereof, with the two aforementioned subreddits as case studies.
