Online social media platforms use automated moderation systems to remove or reduce the visibility of rule-breaking content. While previous work has documented the importance of manual content moderation, the effects of automated content moderation remain largely unknown, in part due to the technical and ethical challenges in assessing their impact using randomized experiments. Here, in a large study of Facebook comments ($n=412$M), we used a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to measure the impact of automated content moderation on subsequent rule-breaking behavior (number of comments hidden or deleted) and engagement (number of additional comments posted). We found that comment deletion decreased subsequent rule-breaking behavior in shorter threads (20 or fewer comments), even among other participants, suggesting that the intervention prevented conversations from derailing. Further, the effect of deletion on the affected user's subsequent rule-breaking behavior was longer-lived than its effect on reducing commenting in general, suggesting that users were deterred from rule-breaking but not from continuing to comment. However, hiding (rather than deleting) content had small and statistically insignificant effects. Overall, our results suggest that automated content moderation can increase adherence to community guidelines.
翻译:在线社交媒体平台使用自动回溯系统来消除或降低规则破碎内容的可见度。 虽然先前的工作记录了手工内容节制的重要性,但自动内容节制的效果在很大程度上仍不为人所知,部分原因是在利用随机实验评估其影响方面存在技术和道德挑战。 在对Facebook评论(n=412M美元)的大规模研究中,我们使用模糊的回归不连续设计来衡量自动内容节制对随后规则破碎行为(隐藏或删除的评论数量)和接触(张贴的其他评论数量)的影响。我们发现,评论删除后的规则破碎行为在短线上减少了(20或更少的评论),甚至在其他参与者中也是如此,这表明这种干预阻止了谈话的脱轨。此外,删除对受影响用户随后的违反规则行为的影响比对减少一般评论的影响要长,这表明用户对规则破解规则行为持阻力,但不再继续评论。然而,隐藏(而不是删除)内容的效应很小,在统计上也微不足道。总体而言,我们发现自动内容节制会增加遵守社区准则的情况。