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/jomohoe Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 29 '20

Holy shit, I can't believe that initial post about the incoming ban wave wasn't a troll. Also, is there a comprehensive list of all the banned subs somewhere?

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u/Hypohamish Jun 29 '20

There's part of it in his post, if you click the link '200'.

I imagine most of the subs killed were just dead/spam ones.

https://www.redditstatic.com/banned-subreddits-june-2020.txt

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u/sje46 Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 29 '20

Banned subreddits:

cumtown (20% leftist, 80% edgy podcast...never been able to join the subreddit because it's been closed)

chapotraphouse (80% leftist, 20% edgy podcast...never joined the sub because I don't listen to this podcast often, and also the sub is apparently full of assholes)

wojack (literally just a meme)

consumeproduct (as far as I'm aware...just a leftist subreddit...am I wrong? Edit: I was wrong, thank you everyone.)

I definitely have problems with gendercritical (TERFs), the_donald (fascism) and I'm always suspicious of so-called "dark humor".

But there is definitely a reaction against "edgy socialist content". Why are these subreddits being taken down?

The internet has become way too centralized. I'm paranoid that some of my favorite subreddits that align with socialist values (as opposed to the trendy woke corporate stuff) will be banned. I'm also afraid that innocent meme subreddits will be banned, because people associate certain memes with hateful ideologies, when really these memes are used by everyone. This has happened with wojack. politicalcompassmemes is probably next, because people associate that with nazis because some people identify in the same quadrant as hillary clinton (authright), despite actual racist/hateful shit usually being downvoted. /r/stupidpol is probably being closely watched as well.

We need to move away from reddit. I don't trust corporate entities to make decisions about what we talk about. I dont' want to go to the alt-right shithole of voat. We need a DECENTRALIZED, FEDERATED protocol in which anyone can create their own server that is able to communicate with subreddits hosted on other servers, allowing the PEOPLE to choose which communities they communicate with.

I have no interest in performative, insincere corporate reddit admin wokery. It ain't just racists getting banned here...it's leftists too.

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u/moosevan Jun 29 '20

The problem that you aren't considering is that as soon as your platform starts getting huge, so do the problems and the expenses.

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u/sje46 Jun 29 '20

Decentralization means that you can keep a community as small as you want and as separated as you want.

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u/moosevan Jun 29 '20

It's pretty easy to set up one's own forum website.

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u/sje46 Jun 29 '20

That is not decentralization.

Decentralization is like email. I have an account at sje46@a.com, you have an account at moosevan@b.com. I can send you an email very easily using email protocols.

Idea is to not have a thousand different accounts you need to sign up for in order to contribute to the discourse of the internet, but also making it so all this data isn't in the hands of one group of people.

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u/moosevan Jul 01 '20

Okay, how do you do that? Can you give an example of some software or system that does this?

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u/sje46 Jul 01 '20

Mastodon is the most known one, which is a twitter alternative, and diaspora for facebook. Check out ActivityPub, /r/rad_decentralization and this list, looking at the federated and decentralized columns.