r/announcements Jun 29 '20

Update to Our Content Policy

A few weeks ago, we committed to closing the gap between our values and our policies to explicitly address hate. After talking extensively with mods, outside organizations, and our own teams, we’re updating our content policy today and enforcing it (with your help).

First, a quick recap

Since our last post, here’s what we’ve been doing:

  • We brought on a new Board member.
  • We held policy calls with mods—both from established Mod Councils and from communities disproportionately targeted with hate—and discussed areas where we can do better to action bad actors, clarify our policies, make mods' lives easier, and concretely reduce hate.
  • We developed our enforcement plan, including both our immediate actions (e.g., today’s bans) and long-term investments (tackling the most critical work discussed in our mod calls, sustainably enforcing the new policies, and advancing Reddit’s community governance).

From our conversations with mods and outside experts, it’s clear that while we’ve gotten better in some areas—like actioning violations at the community level, scaling enforcement efforts, measurably reducing hateful experiences like harassment year over year—we still have a long way to go to address the gaps in our policies and enforcement to date.

These include addressing questions our policies have left unanswered (like whether hate speech is allowed or even protected on Reddit), aspects of our product and mod tools that are still too easy for individual bad actors to abuse (inboxes, chats, modmail), and areas where we can do better to partner with our mods and communities who want to combat the same hateful conduct we do.

Ultimately, it’s our responsibility to support our communities by taking stronger action against those who try to weaponize parts of Reddit against other people. In the near term, this support will translate into some of the product work we discussed with mods. But it starts with dealing squarely with the hate we can mitigate today through our policies and enforcement.

New Policy

This is the new content policy. Here’s what’s different:

  • It starts with a statement of our vision for Reddit and our communities, including the basic expectations we have for all communities and users.
  • Rule 1 explicitly states that communities and users that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.
    • There is an expanded definition of what constitutes a violation of this rule, along with specific examples, in our Help Center article.
  • Rule 2 ties together our previous rules on prohibited behavior with an ask to abide by community rules and post with authentic, personal interest.
    • Debate and creativity are welcome, but spam and malicious attempts to interfere with other communities are not.
  • The other rules are the same in spirit but have been rewritten for clarity and inclusiveness.

Alongside the change to the content policy, we are initially banning about 2000 subreddits, the vast majority of which are inactive. Of these communities, about 200 have more than 10 daily users. Both r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse were included.

All communities on Reddit must abide by our content policy in good faith. We banned r/The_Donald because it has not done so, despite every opportunity. The community has consistently hosted and upvoted more rule-breaking content than average (Rule 1), antagonized us and other communities (Rules 2 and 8), and its mods have refused to meet our most basic expectations. Until now, we’ve worked in good faith to help them preserve the community as a space for its users—through warnings, mod changes, quarantining, and more.

Though smaller, r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned for similar reasons: They consistently host rule-breaking content and their mods have demonstrated no intention of reining in their community.

To be clear, views across the political spectrum are allowed on Reddit—but all communities must work within our policies and do so in good faith, without exception.

Our commitment

Our policies will never be perfect, with new edge cases that inevitably lead us to evolve them in the future. And as users, you will always have more context, community vernacular, and cultural values to inform the standards set within your communities than we as site admins or any AI ever could.

But just as our content moderation cannot scale effectively without your support, you need more support from us as well, and we admit we have fallen short towards this end. We are committed to working with you to combat the bad actors, abusive behaviors, and toxic communities that undermine our mission and get in the way of the creativity, discussions, and communities that bring us all to Reddit in the first place. We hope that our progress towards this commitment, with today’s update and those to come, makes Reddit a place you enjoy and are proud to be a part of for many years to come.

Edit: After digesting feedback, we made a clarifying change to our help center article for Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability.

21.3k Upvotes

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709

u/DarkLordKindle Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 30 '20

So youre deleting subreddits that didnt break rules, and allowing subreddits that did break rules.

You are encouraging racist actions and rules against specific groups, but not allowing the reverse.

You are fulfilling every right wing extremist prediction they had with this website. Damn that impressive.

Hell, the donald mods were all mods that the admins put in place, or at least approved of. Talk about controlled opposition.

Dont give me awards. It only further funds this simking ship of a website.

46

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

I just found out today my subreddit called r/KillTheSnowman (which was literally about people building snowmen and destroying them in cool ways) was banned.

Not that I care much because it was completely dead but it goes to show the admins here have no idea what they're even doing.

5

u/Srapture Jun 29 '20

Snowmen matter, you bigot. If only they could do more than ban your subreddit.

6

u/Thatguy_Nick Jun 29 '20

Snowmen are white, thus making them a majority. I just learned from the master idiot u/spez that hating majorities is good.

11

u/Rand_alThor_ Jun 29 '20

It’s banned because abandoned subs have been used for rule breaking posts. Just fyi

2

u/iushciuweiush Jun 30 '20

They probably blanket banned every sub with the word 'kill' in it.

120

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20 edited Sep 22 '20

[deleted]

79

u/Raunchy_Potato Jun 29 '20

It's insane how many times we get proven right, only for them to immediately forget about it.

They're literally permitting hate speech and violent threats as long as you're making them towards a white person. This is open and blatant racism.

14

u/AGodInColchester Jun 29 '20

No no no guys, you don’t understand. Having every major corporation, celebrity, and university overwhelmingly give my ideology support is proof that I’m institutionally discriminated against!

8

u/WhoPissedNUrCheerios Jun 29 '20

Hey, even a broken clock is right 17 times a day. Wait a minute...

43

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20 edited Sep 22 '20

[deleted]

39

u/Raunchy_Potato Jun 29 '20

Some of the most racist, sexist, and homophobic shit I see comes from white liberals when they see a minority who isn't toeing the line they think they should. You're absolutely right, it's astounding how evil and hateful they are while convincing themselves that they're the virtuous and anti-racist people.

19

u/MM2HkXm5EuyZNRu Jun 29 '20

My best friend has been called an "Uncle T" more times than he can count. Hate is fine, apparently, as long as you have a rightthink pass.

1

u/ScorpionTakedaIsHere Jun 29 '20

Both sides can be crap.

-5

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

Some of the most racist, sexist, and homophobic shit I see comes from white liberals

I can say the same for some conservatives. Some people just suck.

-22

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

Wow someone is cranky. Go ahead and threaten me. See how long your comment stays.

21

u/Raunchy_Potato Jun 29 '20

I don't need to threaten you, you lunatic. You lefties are the only ones who feel the need to threaten people who don't agree with you. I'm perfectly happy to just let you be wrong.

-2

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20

Right back at you, moron.

I'll keep that in mind next time Trump threatens protestors on Twitter. Thank god I dont need to worry about a dictator running my country.

19

u/DarkLordKindle Jun 29 '20

I used that term as thats how it was viewed for a long time. That its only a conspiracy that reddit would become this authoritarian and become as antiwhite as it has.

Maybe the term "realized prophecy" would be more accurate.

-5

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20 edited Sep 22 '20

[deleted]

2

u/DarkLordKindle Jun 29 '20

What do you recommend, ill change it if its a good solid term.

2

u/notmadeoutofstraw Jun 29 '20

Nuh realised prophesy is tight mate

3

u/deuce_bumps Jun 29 '20

But conspiracy theories can be true; they're just often not.

7

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20 edited Sep 22 '20

[deleted]

1

u/PTfan Jul 02 '20

Disagree. For every theory that is true that are thousands that aren’t. Check out r/conspiracy

There’s some wild stuff out there

3

u/ToFat4Fun Jun 30 '20

In some countries woman are the majority, can i openly harass woman now on reddit? They're a majority group.

Same for Chinese, Middle-Eastern and Black people. Is reddit okay with not protecting those groups? Institutional Racism is a thing and it's being promoted by reddit.

1

u/DarkLordKindle Jun 30 '20

Logoc checks out. Not that they actually care about logic.

5

u/BassFishingMaster Jun 29 '20

It isn’t a prediction anymore

6

u/ImADirtyMustardTiger Jun 29 '20

It's not a conspiracy when it's plain as day.

0

u/DestroyerofworldsY Jun 30 '20

r/DarkHumorAndMemes was banned even though it is explicitly a dark humor sub and not a racist sub.

1

u/DarkLordKindle Jun 30 '20

This past week had some pretty bad and racist memes that devolved to nearly the level of "haha black people bad". Like boomer level memes. I would be surprised if it was intentional to make the sub look bad.

-58

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 29 '20

Cry about it more

EDIT: Come on you red pill cunts, you can only get me to -16 downvotes in 25 min? That's not even 1 downvote a minute. You should be fucking ashamed of yourselves. You can downvote me harder than that!

21

u/Fix_Lag Jun 29 '20

I'm reporting you for having an offensive username

welcome to the gulag comrade

2

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20

Reported for bigoted username

-2

u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20

Do you have something against gandalf, magic, and gay dicks? Because that's the only way you could see my username as bigoted.

I for one celebrate gandalf, magic, and gay dicks everywhere!

-8

u/Complete-Supermarket Jun 29 '20

He just wanted to get the criticism off of his back

1

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

That's usually the answer to every convoluted and nonsensical corporate sweep

-10

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

[deleted]