The Effect of Moderator Bots on Abusive Language Use
Li-Yin Young · 2018
Moderator bots are widely used on forums and social media. On Internet forums, moderator bots play an important role in automatically monitoring the content of images and the text present on the forum as well as providing repetitive information without the need for interaction with an administrator. The increasing use of moderator bots inspired me to study the performance of moderator bots. To date, research investigating the effect of moderator bots has not been conducted. Herein, we analyzed Reddit, a popular U.S. social news aggregation platform, which uses a moderator bot (AutoModerator) to mitigate the invalid comments occurring in discussion groups. This has thus become an ideal research opportunity for this study. We implemented a regression discontinuity design and interrupted time-series analysis to estimate the effect of AutoModerator on word-quality improvement. We observed an abrupt and significant decrease in the rate of abusive posts to which AutoModerator was attached. These results suggest that AutoModerator has been effective in controlling the word quality.