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The Reddit Files
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Studies on Reddit's Political Lean and Biased Removals

A 2024 University of Michigan study of over 600 million comments found that Reddit moderators are more likely to remove comments that oppose their own politics, and that the average moderator leans slightly further left than the average user. The authors stress that the bias runs in both directions. A 2021 Nature study found Reddit's 2016 polarization was driven mainly by an influx of new right-wing users.

Oct 28, 2024
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Whose side it served: Neither party

The research finds moderator bias on both sides, layered on a user base that leans left overall.

What the record shows

Justin Huang, Jangwon Choi and Yuqin Wan analyzed comments from about 1.2 million users in over a hundred subreddits. On a 0-100 scale (0 = staunchest Republican, 100 = staunchest Democrat), the average user scored 58 and the average moderator 62. Huang said comments opposite to moderators' views 'are more likely to be removed' but that 'biased content moderation is not limited to any one side.' Separately, Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson's 2021 Nature paper, using 5.1 billion comments from 2005-2018, found right-wing communities polarized sharply around 2016 while left-wing and centrist communities barely did.

In their words

“biased content moderation is not limited to any one side”— Justin Huang, University of Michigan Ross School of Business · source
“Polarization on Reddit was disproportionately driven by new users appearing on the platform.”— University of Toronto Computer Science news release on Waller and Anderson's Nature study · source
The other side

Because Reddit as a whole leans left and moderators lean slightly further left, a symmetric bias still produces more removals of conservative comments site-wide. Equally, the research documents in-group bias by moderators in both left and right communities, not a platform-directed policy against conservatives.

Sources

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