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If you were starting a new social media platform—one that tried to balance civil behavior with strong engagement—and were looking for an example to emulate, Chris Vargo has an unexpected one to offer.

Vargo, an associate professor of advertising at CU ������ý����’s College of Communication, Media, Design and Information, out in Social Science Computer Review that examines the role moderation and decentralized community rules have played in limiting incivility on Reddit.

“It’s not a moderated world in which we live in online, but I think what’s neat about Reddit is that they have these self-enforcing communities—and they work,” Vargo said.

Content accuracy was once an important plank for social media giants like Meta, which hired moderators to sift through the cesspools and remove false or misleading posts about the pandemic, Jan. 6 insurrection and other controversial topics. Uniquely, Reddit relies on volunteers to police posts that are abusive or inaccurate.

The paper, which Vargo co-authored with Toby Hopp, a fellow associate professor in the college’s Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Design, used machine learning tools to study 20 of the most popular subreddits—topic-specific communities hosted on the Reddit platform—in news and politics to understand how community rules could shape both engagement and uncivil behavior.

“Each subreddit is a different community, and they all have different rules and different guidelines on what’s acceptable,” Vargo said. Some groups, he said, encourage incivility—like sports subreddits where fans trash on a rival team, as well as some in the political sphere. “But you also have subreddits that don’t allow for that kind of incivility, or the casting of people as being out-group.”

That’s important because social media has empowered anonymous keyboard warriors to toss around death threats, dox opponents and belittle people for their ideas. Those kinds of uncivil behaviors—as opposed to just general vulgarity—were the focus of this research.

“For a democracy to have diverse voices, people need to feel safe posting content online,” Vargo said. “And we know from incivility studies that silencing and marginalizing opponents, telling them their viewpoints don’t matter, is a great way to silence them.”

When it comes to improving civil discourse on social media, the paper found the strength of a community’s moderation policies and enforcement correlated with greater civility among its participants.

“The more rules that are in a community, the better quality of communication in that subreddit,” Vargo said. “That’s important because building community is less about content moderation and more about content contextualization—this idea of sharing the truth when a poster might not be truthful, or saying when someone's misleading in a comment if they are being misleading.”

Changing perspectives on toxicity

The idea that one would consider Reddit a haven from, as opposed to a hotbed of, toxic behavior would have raised more than a few eyebrows in the past. But as major players in artificial intelligence have looked for new content platforms to scrape, Reddit has tried to sanitize its image. Those efforts have included removing problematic communities from the platform as well as putting moderation in the hands of volunteer users. Last year, the platform struck a $60 million deal with Google that allowed the search giant to train its A.I. models on users’ posts.

“We really expected Reddit to be pretty toxic, but I’ve done a couple papers recently that both point to Reddit being fairly safe, with not a lot of threats,” Vargo said. “I would say it is probably more of a model than it is a problem.”

When it comes to advertising and social media, engagement is the name of the game—one reason why name-calling, shaming and starting fights online tends to be rewarded by algorithms, which are designed to keep people on the site, in order to deliver more ads to users. In this study, though, Vargo said, internet indecorousness amounted to “just a tiny bit” of increased engagement. ��

“I think it’s great to see on a social media platform that those behaviors aren’t driving engagement quite the way we may have thought,” he said. “Because I don’t think it should be so easy to mine us for engagement, and for it to be so closely linked to hate.”

So, for both existing and emerging platforms, the idea of user-governed communities is worth consideration.

“I would highly encourage other places, like Facebook groups, to allow for those types of moderators to have that role over removing content and enforcing rules,” Vargo said, noting that his paper collected commonly used rules that keep successful subreddits civil.��

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.