Reddit Comments Removed for Macro Norm Violations, May 2016 to March 2017

Over 40,000 Reddit comments removed by moderators from 100 subreddits between May 2016 and March 2017, labeled according to 8 macro norm violations. The dataset was created by researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology as an extension of a CSCW 2018 paper. It includes a log of over 2 million removed comments and 8 files each containing 5,000+ examples of specific norm violations.

Use Cases

• Train classifiers to detect macro norm violations based on labeled comment text.
• Analyze patterns of removed content across different subreddits based on the provided community list.
• Study the enforcement of platform-wide rules using the preprocessed text of over 2 million removed comments.
• Benchmark topic modeling approaches for identifying categories of harmful speech.

Strengths

• Includes over 40,000 human-labeled examples of norm violations.
• Covers 100 different subreddits, providing a broad view of Reddit.
• Comments are preprocessed (lowercase, punctuation removed) for analysis.
• Based on a hybrid methodology combining classification, topic modeling, and open-coding.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Data is limited to a specific time period (May 2016 to March 2017) and may not reflect current norms.

Provenance

Source

Georgia Institute of Technology research team, available via paperswithcode and GitHub.

Collection Method

Comments were collected from Reddit, filtered, and labeled using a hybrid approach of classification, topic modeling (LDA), and open-coding.

Time Range

May 2016 to March 2017