> resulted in less hate on the platform as a whole The study is interesting, but this is decidedly not what it says, and you should be wary of overinterpretin

> resulted in less hate on the platform as a whole The study is interesting, but this is decidedly not what it says, and you should be wary of overinterpreting its arguments. If you look at the definition of hate speech they used, it was defined as "the vocabulary of the subreddits in question". This isn't a general complaint about hate speech being slippery and hard to pin down, it's a criticism of the fact that defining it as the specific vocabulary of the subreddits in question is a huge confounder. What the study's conclusion boils down to is: "If you ban a subreddit, the exact vocabulary (in-jokes, etc) of that subreddit declines." Well, duh. This is an especially tautological result for communities that have such a rich vocabulary of in-jokes (and slurs) :( There's not much in the paper to suggest that the emigrants from coontown and FPH aren't expressing the exact same ideas elsewhere, without using the exact same lexicon that they developed in their original communities. I would be surprised if this result didn't replicate for pretty miuch any community that has its own internal vocabulary and in-jokes, such as nominally pro-social-justice subreddits or even narrow political subreddits like /r/anarchism or something.