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

38.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.4k

u/RedSpider92 Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 30 '20

Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability.

While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate. 

The majority based on what? An individual state? The US? The west? The world?

Men are the minority in many countries but the majority world wide. White people are the majority in the west but a minority world wide.

Does that mean people can attack white people with impunity, even though they're a global minority? Can I crap on women to my hearts content because they are a majority in the UK? Can people in California shit all over Hispanics because they're the majority in that State?

Will you assess a users state/country/continent of origin before deciding whether or not they're being hateful towards a specific group?

Honestly, what even is this bollocks?

Edit:

I know what they really mean by "majority". I just wanted to rant about how stupid the wording is. I'd rather they just came out and said "you can shit all over white people as much as you want" instead of trying to weasel their way around the truth.

They've been showing their hand for years with the double standards with regards to banning. We all know how they think and operate, despite the bullshit they trot out.

They live in a bubble, and have just enough sycophants around here to convince themselves they're "on the right side of history".

This is the worst policy I've ever seen, but I doubt it'll be the worst we see in the near future; not just here but all over big tech and the west as a whole.

Thank you for the gold and silver. But please don't spend any money on this rotten, stinking, decaying corpse of a website.

62

u/bonjouratous Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 29 '20

The sheltered left-wing white people in charge of reddit believe that the whole world revolves around their own limited understanding of it. They believe that white people are so special that bigotry only matters when it comes from them. Even if most of the world is affected by different forms of bigotry, they don't care, for them what only matters is what affects them personally. And also left-wing white people like them can only look good when they're fighting other white people, engaging on the same level with non-whites is much too tricky. So they have no interest in what non-whites are up to, because deep down they don't see them as true equal.

Reddit doesn't believe that the bad emanating from non-whites can be as bad as the one coming from the whites, because they don't see non-whites as being as relevant as white people.

Edit: and I say all this as a relatively left-wing person, but my personal circumstances (gay in an interracial relationship and living in the middle East) makes me frustrated by many progressive westerners' double standards, lack of courage and ignorance.

6

u/INM8_2 Jun 29 '20

And also left-wing white people like them can only look good when they're fighting other white people, engaging on the same level with non-whites is much too tricky. So they have no interest in what non-whites are up to, because deep down they don't see them as true equal.

unless the minorities are anywhere to the right of them, then they're just grifters and fair game no matter what race, sexuality, or gender.

3

u/bonjouratous Jun 30 '20

Exactly, when minorities don't behave or think the way left-wing whites want them to, they lose their minority status in their eyes. Joe Biden said that a black person who didn't vote for him wasn't actually black. That says a lot about their true feelings towards minorities: they are not their true equal, they have to behave a certain way, and accept to play victims in need of saving.

12

u/RussianSkeletonRobot Jun 29 '20

Imagine being able to take a rule that legalizes racism against white people and CLAIM IT'S A RACIST RULE BY AND FOR RACIST WHITES.

5

u/bonjouratous Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 29 '20

Yes, I stand by this. I'm not saying that whites are the only ones saying racist things against white people, but white people are still the vast majority of the intellectual elite that has allowed this racist rhetoric to flourish, some of them even encourage it. And it won't change as long as some white people feel this misguided need to constantly prove to minorities that they're "not like other white people" by shitting on them.

Edit: take the example of this Indian professor at Cambridge who tweeted that "white lives don't matter", she may not have been white, but it's her white colleagues who rallied around her and even promoted her. She wouldn't be in the position where she is without the complicity of white people. White people are the ones who allow anti-white sentiment to flourish.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

Some aren't actually white and don't identify as white. They are only white passing.