  Evaluating the effects of moderation interventions is a task of paramount
importance, as it allows assessing the success of content moderation processes.
So far, intervention effects have been almost solely evaluated at the
aggregated platform or community levels. Here, we carry out a multidimensional
evaluation of the user-level effects of the sequence of moderation
interventions that targeted r/The_Donald: a community of Donald Trump adherents
on Reddit. We demonstrate that the interventions: 1) strongly reduced user
activity; 2) slightly increased the diversity of the subreddits in which users
participated; 3) slightly reduced user toxicity; and 4) gave way to the sharing
of less factual and more politically biased news. Importantly, we also find
that interventions having strong community level effects are associated to
extreme and diversified user-level reactions. Our results highlight that
community-level effects are not always representative of the underlying
behavior of individuals or smaller user groups. We conclude by discussing the
practical and ethical implications of our results. Overall, our findings can
inform the development of targeted moderation interventions and provide useful
guidance for policing online platforms.
