Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit.
More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage.
In other words, other subreddits did not inherit the problem.
Banning an entire bigoted instance from yours, i.e. defederating, will accomplish the goal of reducing and removing bigoted behavior from your instance.