Ribeiro, Manoel Horta, Justin Cheng, and Robert West. "Post approvals in online communities." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 16. 2022.

This study investigates the impact of post approvals on online community behavior through an analysis of 233,402 Facebook Groups. It discovers that communities often adopt post approvals following increases in user activity and moderation challenges, leading to fewer but higher-quality posts. Despite a decrease in the number of posts, community engagement, in terms of comments, reactions, and time spent, increases, while reports on posts decrease. The study also finds that post approvals don't significantly change the time leaders spend in the group, but communities may appoint more leaders after adoption. The effects of post approvals vary based on group size and implementation strategy, offering insights into improving proactive content moderation in online communities.