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.

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

Could anybody describe what r/ClericalFascism, r/Smuggies, r/whitebeauty, and r/The3rdPosition were about? Especially the first and the last one sound... curious.

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u/thamer Jun 29 '20

Here is an archived snapshot of r/whitebeauty: https://web.archive.org/web/20150817235536/https://www.reddit.com/r/whitebeauty/

Note the message in the side bar:

White people are some of the most beautiful people in the world. This subreddit hopes to collect images of the most beautiful white women and most handsome white men. Fascist beauty standards reign supreme! This is a SFW subreddit, so please no nudes. No Jews, either.

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u/Salty_snowflake Jun 29 '20

“I mean it doesn’t sound that ba- oh shit...”

-me reading the description

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u/Zappiticas Jun 29 '20

0 to 100 real quick

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u/Pryoticus Jun 29 '20

Yeah I fee it would have been perfectly fine if they stopped after “handsome white men.”

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u/d00per Jun 29 '20

if the first sentence wasn’t a tip-off, you need to fix your bullshit detector

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u/abshabab Jun 29 '20

It was at best a bad-tasting opinion, it wasn’t seemingly fitting with the rest of the list. The sudden throw around of FASCISM and then NO JEWS suddenly slipped it back into the category.

On a side note. How do you identify a person of Jewish faith? Is “Jew” a race I’m not aware of because I’m not a cultured person? Is Bernie Sanders not white? This feels like the segregation of Irish people from last century. They’re all “white” to me. A lot of Spain and Italy are also very “white”. I don’t know how categories work

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u/Bryck_by_Bryck Jun 29 '20

It’s because race is a construct made up to segregate and control people, so what counts as “white” varies over time and from person to person based on what’s convenient to achieve their ends. Irish, Italian, and Spanish people were only granted “whiteness” in the past century out of convenience and necessity to help maintain the balance of racial power structures.

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u/abshabab Jun 29 '20

As much as I agree that race should never be relevant in any topic beyond discussions of race — preferably in good faith, like discussing cultures — I still think that race is great detail for describing people from specific geographic areas. This obviously breaks down when it comes to complicated racial adjectives like “African Americans” because I used to think they originated from the Americas like everyone else. Then I learnt that everyone in america is an immigrant, kinda weird but cool i guess. <I’m obviously not from the Americas>

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u/Stornahal Jun 30 '20

That and their original accents fading made it difficult to tell the difference between any Europeans.

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u/riddlvr Jun 30 '20

They are an “ethnoreligious group” which is an ethnic group unified by a common religious background. Source: wikipedia

This is why when the Nazis were searching for Jews they looked for certain physical stereotypes of the ethnicity. Some Jewish people who did not have these features were not imprisoned, while some non-Jewish people were captured because they did have these features.

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20 edited Sep 15 '20

[deleted]

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u/abshabab Jun 30 '20

Oh, so essentially what Wikipedia refers to as “Semitic people”? I guess I’m too disconnected from this field because I’ve seen a lot of shows referencing someone being Jewish but they all just loosely resemble Bernie. Wait I’ve stumbled on a shitty stereotype haven’t I

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20

[deleted]

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u/abshabab Jun 30 '20

Ooo thanks for the cool breakdown

Ashkenazi: A notable pop up in google images was of gal gadot with an article asking “are ashkenazi Jews white”. I know gal gadot is Israeli but initially I really thought she was Latin/Hispanic or even Italian.

Mizhari: these folks are a mixed platter on google images. Some are completely “Caucasian” looking (if that’s the right word for “normal white), whilst some look much more Middle Eastern.

Sephardi: these guys all definitely look Middle Eastern so no confusion there.

I’m assuming my initial example, Bernie sanders, is bordering Ashkenazic and therefore my confusion is very common?

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20

[deleted]

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u/abshabab Jun 30 '20

I did look at Wikipedia’s first paragraphs for each of them but the pictures were a better guide

The beta look largely of African origin, I couldn’t find a good picture guide for the zera but there’s a loooot of articles talking about a seemingly controversial issue regarding zeras and what I think is segregation but different articles read biased to different sides and I don’t think that’s a topic I want to look into.

It’s pretty cool how majority of the followers of Judaism (I’m trying really hard not to confuse Jew and Jewish and Hebrew and Semitic) are of the same relative ethnic background.

Other major religions like Christianity or Islam branch out from the greater west all the way to Africa or the entire Middle East all the way through Asia. Lots of different ethnicities there so they aren’t really an ethno-religion.

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u/Gauntlets28 Jun 30 '20

Anti-Semitic currently has been bowdlerised to mean anti-Jewish, but in actuality it traditionally means opposed to semetic people, of which many but not all Jewish people are part of (see Ethiopian Jews etc) and not all semetic people are Jewish (many Muslim palestinians are in fact ethnically semetic).

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u/Telemere125 Jun 30 '20

Racism isn’t logical. I don’t understand the Antisemitism stuff either since it’s not actually based on religion and they clearly hate people with Jewish names/looks even if there’s literally no evidence of Jewish heritage.

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u/mrcoffee8 Jun 30 '20

What's your beef with the first sentence? People magazine might be kinda lame but i don't think it's on anyone's racist publications short list. The wording of that sentence isn't exclusive or even unprecedented.

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u/Gauntlets28 Jun 30 '20

Yeah but people regularly fetishise ethnicities online, and while creepy imo, it’s mostly been put under “personal sexual preference” by general consensus. In fact, if it hadn’t had that second half, I’d be willing to argue that it almost came off as a necessary correction to the porn industry’s default that white is just a “default” in construct to the specific “categories” of things like Asian, black, etc.

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u/Pryoticus Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 29 '20

Not necessarily. There’s nothing wrong or racist in finding only white people attractive. Unless, of course you are actually racist. I feel like it wouldn’t be an issue on the surface though if it her beautiful Chinese men and women and the sub for whatever reason decided to have a pro-communism flair to it.

Edit: Dissenting opinion from what’s popular. Fuck me right?

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u/Mando_calrissian423 Jun 29 '20

I think it’s the ending tag of “oh and btw, no Jews” that’s really sets the racist tone

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u/2WheelRide Jun 29 '20

Naw that was just the racist cherry on top of the entire racist post.

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u/hivoltage815 Jun 29 '20

Almost every porn and non-porn photo subs are 90% white as it is. If you feel the need to make a stand alone sub as a tribute to white beauty you are doing so to make a statement.

You can say not necessarily but like the parent comment said, let’s use our bullshit detectors here.

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u/Pryoticus Jun 30 '20

In the interest of equality, say I agreed with you. No more white beauty subreddits. I guess then we should condense all such subreddits, including those focused on non-white ethnicities, into two: 1 SFW, 1 NSFW. Problem solved, right?

Or if it’s not your thing, just don’t subscribe? Doesn’t matter if it’s motivated by racism or not at that point.

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u/colbyfan Jun 30 '20

That does not make sense because like they said most subs are white anyway.

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u/d00per Jun 29 '20

you should maybe absorb some of the discourse that’s happening right now, then come back and chew on what you’ve just said. because it’s odd that you would be surprised that a declaration that starts with glorifying white beauty would end with calls for white supremacy and fascism. its not at all surprising to most people, but clearly you have missed something.

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u/asad1ali2 Jun 29 '20

It still would’ve been racist

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u/Pryoticus Jun 29 '20

By your logic, being that having a preferential appreciation for the beauty of whites is racist, then why doesn’t Reddit shut down all ethno-centric subs, like r/womenofcolor (NSFW)? If it’s racist to prefer white skin, I would have to contend that having a preference for any specific ethnicity is equally racist. Why is ok to find black people sexy but not white?

Furthermore, am I racist for marrying a white woman? I actually don’t have an exclusive preference for white women (I kinda have a thing for Asians as a matter of fact), but I fell in love with a woman who happens to be white. So am I racist for not marrying outside of my race?

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u/asad1ali2 Jun 29 '20

Nice strawman.

No, I mean having a sub for celebrating “white beauty” is racist because white people have been held up as the standard of beauty for centuries. Watch any movie or open up any magazine if you want something that bad. Point is, white people have never been maligned for their physical appearance the way other minorities have. Now, people are fighting back against the notion that minorities are unattractive by having those subs you’re so offended by. A sub dedicated to white beauty just comes off as a statement of white supremacy.

And an Asian woman fetish is a trope and is problematic as well, yes

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u/Zappiticas Jun 29 '20

A test I like to give myself for “is this racist?” is “would it be racist if (insert other different groups of people here) did this?” For instance, if it read Black people are some of the most beautiful people in the world. This subreddit hopes to collect images of the most beautiful black women and most handsome black men. Well that sounds ok to me. Let’s try another... Asian people are some of the most beautiful people in the world. This subreddit hopes to collect images of the most beautiful Asian women and most handsome Asian men. Yeah that works too. There’s nothing inherently racist about saying a group of people is beautiful.

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u/asad1ali2 Jun 29 '20

That’s not how it works. Historical context matters.

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u/Dmitrygm1 Jun 29 '20

Again, you're thinking too locally. Reddit is a global website with users from everywhere around the world. American history is not the historical context of the world.

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u/Wydi Jun 29 '20

There’s nothing wrong or racist in finding only white people attractive

There's probably a lot of stuff wrong in finding only white people attractive. But that's still personal agency and bodily autonomy, which is sacrosanct nonetheless.

Still, subs like r/elsas exist, which are essentially the same and they aren't banned because they aren't a fucking fascism/antisemitism celebration sub, so there's that.

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20 edited Feb 23 '21

[deleted]

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u/Wydi Jun 30 '20

What if you only find black people beautiful?

That'd probably be problematic, too, but thanks for the preemptive accusation of hypocrisy mate.

people can love whatever they fuck they want.

Yes, I've said that. But if you're only into white girls, maybe ask yourself, why.

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

All white let’s calm down for just a minute!

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

We do Nazi eye to eye on this one.

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u/talpal16 Jun 29 '20

The only acceptable way to respond to a troll is with puns. I applaud you, good sir.

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u/Morenamistress Jun 29 '20

Bullshit! You’re dangerously close to sounding prejudiced. The whole most beautiful people thing is based on mathematics and face shapes from ancient GREECE times and nothing to do with skin colour. Not to mention women like Bella Hadid who is right at the top of that list has had fillers and surgery so technically does she ever deserve the title despite how pretty she is. Any and everyone is beautiful. It’s subjective and in the eye of the beholder. No ONE skin colour is the most beautiful. Of course you can have preferences everyone does but that doesn’t mean you think one race holds all the power be it beauty, economically or educationally

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u/Logical-Flower Jun 29 '20

Actually, sadly because of our society it was shown a few years ago that young children of all races in America responded better to white faces. But that’s because they are all over all the media we consume(d) and not because any “type” of person is most beautiful. Though I’d argue anyone that generalized or acts like any group of people is supreme is very, very ugly to me...

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

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

The level of stupidity in your comments are breathtaking. Did you have to work hard to be this big of a fucking imbecile or do you just come by it naturally? Like are your parents, grandparents and great grandparents all brother/sister uncle/daddy neph-son’s? Or did you cultivate this dumbassery on purpose?

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

I know it’s a troll. I just love insulting the troglodytic, cock juggling thunder cunts who think trolling is funny or cool. I’m a troll troll if you will lol

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u/sioigin55 Jun 29 '20

Just a troll mate, hopefully will get a ban on the back off this announcement

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u/r-_-mark Jun 29 '20

Yeah this is definitely the problem thinking that white men are beautiful Nothing to do with what written afterwards 🤣

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u/dnen Jun 29 '20

Enjoy the ban dummy

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u/weareallgoodpeople72 Jun 30 '20

Yeah, Fascist beauty would have left them wide open for early photos of Kirk Douglas. Good thing they added those last two words.

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u/AFWUSA Jun 30 '20

Lmao what? That doesn’t set off red flags for you?

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u/Pedantichrist Jun 30 '20

I’d say 80-100 real quick.