The displacement of human communication from conventional physical space to online, virtual, or hybrid spaces represents a major paradigm shift in the way humans interact. Yet, one of the main concerns regarding these technology-powered spaces is that they are perceived as being dysregulated, thus making ground for disinformation to take place or for inappropriate behavior to occur. Analyzing a plagiarism conflict having taken place between content creators on a social media platform, we explored the way the community itself perceived the ethical aspects of the situation, and how the reactions of the community impacted the behavior of the content creators, finally triggering an acknowledgement of the plagiarism and a correction of the situation. Using a combination of temporal analysis of posted comments, and of conventional and AI-assisted content analysis, we investigated how ethical regulation takes place in virtual spaces at the group level. Our results demonstrate that online communities can regulate themselves when it comes to ethical questions, and challenge the view that only top-down strategies can be used to control the behavior of communities within virtual spaces.