Looking on Efficiency of Content Moderation Systems from the Lens of Reddit's Content Moderation Experience During COVID-19

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic added a massive amount of online activity to daily human life and social media became even more relevant. This lead to waves of misinformation and online social harm. As a result, moderation has become even more challenging. Given this challenge, it is critical to analyse the quality of content moderation mechanisms to mitigate hate speech and fake news over social media platforms. Through this study, we observe the efficiency of content moderation systems over social media in times of global emergency and try to find whether and where content moderation systems are lacking. To perform this study, we have taken a major social networking platform under consideration, Reddit, due to its interesting decentralised structure of content moderation and used a dataset of 1.8 Million Reddit submissions from 3172 COVID-19 related subreddits during January 2020–April 2021. Our results unveil a set of important patterns on the impact of a global event on content moderation mechanisms to mitigate toxic content and fake news. Analysing all these points, we offer the comprehensive study that has been undertaken over Reddit with a focus on user-generated content and content moderation system of Reddit.