Dataset — Make Reddit Great Again: Assessing Community Effects of Moderation Interventions on r/The_Donald

Reddit contents and complementary data regarding the r/The_Donald community and its main moderation interventions, used for the corresponding article indicated in the title.

An accompanying R notebook can be found in: https://github.com/amauryt/make_reddit_great_again

If you use this dataset please cite the related article.

The dataset timeframe of the Reddit contents (submissions and comments) spans from 30 weeks before Quarantine (2018-11-28) to 30 weeks after Restriction (2020-09-23). The original Reddit content was collected from the Pushshift monthly data files, transformed, and loaded into two SQLite databases.

The first database, the_donald.sqlite, contains all the available content from r/The_Donald created during the dataset timeframe, with the last content being posted several weeks before the timeframe upper limit. It only has two tables: submissions and comments. It should be noted that the IDs of contents are on base 10 (numeric integer), unlike the original base 36 (alphanumeric) used on Reddit and Pushshift. This is for efficient storage and processing. If necessary, many programming languages or libraries can easily convert IDs from one base to another.

The second database, core_the_donald.sqlite, contains all the available content from core users of r/The_Donald made platform-wise (i.e., within and without the subreddit) during the dataset timeframe. Core users are defined as those who authored either a submission or a comment a week in r/The_Donald during the 30 weeks prior to the subreddit's Quarantine. The database has four tables: submissions, comments, subreddits, and perspective_scores. The subreddits table contains the names of the subreddits to which submissions and comments were made (their IDs are also on base 10). The perspective_scores table contains comment toxicity scores.

The Perspective API was used to score comments based on the attributes toxicity and severe_toxicity. It should be noted that not all of the comments in core_the_donald have a score because the comment body was blank or because the Perspective API returned a request error (after three tries). However, the percentage of missing scores is minuscule.

A third file, mbfc_scores.csv, contains the bias and factual reporting accuracy collected in October 2021 from Media Bias / Fact Check (MBFC). Both attributes are scored on a Likert-like manner. One can associate submissions to MBFC scores by doing a join by the domain column.