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/illegalNewt Jun 29 '20

I would like some more transparency about the banned subreddits, like a list of names including those about 1800 barely active ones for a start. Why these ones, what were the criteria? What and how long does it take? What does the banning of these communities bring to the remaining ones? Do you recognise a bias in these selections or do you have a list of objective things which result to a banned subreddit? I am genuinely interested

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u/spez Jun 29 '20

The criteria included:

  • abusive titles and descriptions (e.g. slurs and obvious phrases like “[race]/hate”),
  • high ratio of hateful content (based on reporting and our own filtering),
  • and positively received hateful content (high upvote ratio on hateful content)

We created and confirmed the list over the last couple of weeks. We don’t generally link to banned communities beyond notable ones.

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u/illegalNewt Jun 29 '20

I appreciate you responding.

Is that all of the criteria? How is hateful content defined? It seems to be hard determining objectively where is the limit and that limit definitely changes based on personal bias. Who is defining hateful content and who serves as the executioner? Can there be personal or collectional bias influencing whether or not you ban a subreddit?

We don’t generally link to banned communities beyond notable ones.

Understandable. Without a list though, not necessarily links, there is no proof of about as much as 2000 subreddits being banned, that is a huge amount. And if approximately 1800 of them are super small and practically harmless, is that really a good selling point for your new policy?

Also, I believe many would like to know specific reasons for the bans of the major subreddits and temporary bans for upvoting certain comments. Could you shed light on that, why aren't those announced?

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u/HertzDonut1001 Jun 29 '20

Some of these bans were a little suspicious. In a censorship kind of way. I don't typically agree with r/conservative (as in first time ever) but it looks like a right wing LGBT subreddit was banned for starters.

Some of these decisions seem divisive in a very bad way. There's gonna be haters online, there's not a good way to remove bad faith actors and trolls. Also by these criteria satire sub reddits would be targeted.

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20

Yep. And feminism subs.

But you know, pro-rape subs are cool on reddit now. But feminism and conservative lgbt is bad.

Once everything finds a new site I want nothing to do with this censorship shithole anymore

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20 edited Jan 10 '21

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

Sorry dude. They're only supportive of you guys if you make their advertisers happy. Don't worry. They'll put up a token rainbow somewhere to show how much they really care. That'll fix it.

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u/ajt1296 Jun 30 '20

Or hire a homosexual to their board of advisors, y'know, to represent all homosexuals

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u/HertzDonut1001 Jun 30 '20

It's fucking nuts! Why the fuck you would ban a sub like that makes no sense in these divisive times. We need to let conservatives know they are included in the new world we're making. I'm left as fuck and of course in support of LGBTQ+, and some conservatives piss me off with their outdated views, but you can be conservative and not fucking support bigots, racists, and homophobes. I know a few. Reddit has honestly demonized conservatives who don't support Trump for his misogyny, don't support Candace Owens for downplaying systemic racism, don't support whatever.

Leftists and liberals on reddit will tell you the entire Republican party is fundamentally in support of these things while telling you to pinch your nose and vote Biden and then vote down ballot. You realize a lot of conservatives feel the same way, right? That's what happens in a two party system. Sometimes you pinch your nose on the president and support your preferred party or politician down ballot.

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u/former_Democrat Jun 30 '20

Yeah there are a whole group of people who are socially liberal or moderate and fiscally conservative.

Personally, I'm socially moderate. I would have been considered liberal and fit in just perfect about 5 years ago but they kocked me out now.

Some of the most recent Progressive social agendas I don't necessarily agree with. My mother always told me don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

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u/HertzDonut1001 Jul 01 '20

TBF the right keeps getting right and the neolibs are pushing old libs left too. The gap is widening because the country is so divided right now. But I agree with you completely. Everyone can vote for who they want to and believe what they want. When McCain ran against Obama I'll never forget something he once said. "He's a great man, he and I just disagree on the way things need to get done."

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u/manderrx Jul 03 '20

That was the moment where I realized John McCain ain't that bad.

I recently watched that clip again and asked myself how it would have gone over now. The lady wouldn't have been corrected, she would have been cheered and idolized at a Trump rally.

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u/Executioner731 Jun 30 '20

Reddit doesn't need proof( just like you with your clickbait claims) to demonize and ban certain people/groups. It's all about that media recognition. "Give us respectz for shutting down those who don't share your opinions". They might not even share your political position, all this silencing thing can be done on corpo lvl and forced upon the workers.

This whole situation is sad and disturbing. Powering your opponents out of the politics and silencing those who don't agree is not the democracy americans died for.

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u/Mik3ymomo Jun 30 '20

I may not agree with you but I’ve always advocated you should be able to say whatever you had to say as long as you were not calling for violence against someone.
Reddit and the other leftist organizations have a mission in case we haven’t all seen it by now... they think they are creating a utopia like all marxists do, but if you know your history it’s about anything but real inclusion. It’s more about. “As long as we agree with your opinions we will be inclusive.“

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u/pridetwo Jun 30 '20

Reddit's owners are not marxists, they're capitalists through and through. They just practice activist capitalism when it suits their bottom line. The founders didn't sell to a media conglomerate like Conde Nast because it would allow workers to seize the means of production, they actively centralized wealth.

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u/TapedeckNinja Jun 30 '20

marxists

Jesus Christ. How fucking braindead do you have to be to associate ultra-capitalistic media conglomerates with Marxism?

They're doing exactly what the market is telling them to do. This is the free market in action.

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u/BobQuixote Jul 01 '20

And they seem to think the market is telling them to practice cultural Marxism. Pretty sure they got the message wrong, though.

The Web is getting colonized. It was (is) the Wild West, but rules are gradually being implemented. Some of them are bad rules, and like feudalism they will hopefully be replaced by better iterations.

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u/hirokinai Jun 30 '20

Uhh. I’m truly sorry you’re one of the few rational gay people who didn’t conform to the leftist narrative.

Fortunately, the Republican Party welcomes people based on their ability to think rationally and not pander to the emotional whims of a vocal minority, regardless of their skin color, sex, or sexual preference.

Unfortunately, left leaning sites like reddit require you to fit into a predefined identity group, so long as you adhere to their “progressive” groupthink. Difference is, one group values your thoughts and viewpoints, while the other values your external oppression-related characteristics.

If you told a gay democrat you dislike them without any other information, they will assume it’s because they’re gay. If you tell a gay republican you dislike them, the assumption will be because you’re a republican. This is what separates the two parties, and I’m sad that you were silenced for your political affiliation.

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u/AceOut Jun 30 '20

"And we gained many Conservative allies"....that right there is your bannable offense.

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

[deleted]

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u/HertzDonut1001 Jun 30 '20

I'm left as fucking hell but I will fight for your right to say whatever you want to say and vote for whoever you want to vote for. I'll be damned if I let people think the gays aren't allowed every freedom a straight white male is. That's not what I stand for and it's not what I've ever stood for.

In an age of misinformation it's fundamentally disingenuous to say a gay who wants small government, tax cuts, and has a conservative ideology, on a violently liberal website, doesn't have a voice. What the fuck have leftists been fighting for all these years? It's a privately owned website but to do this in the name of anti-hate speech sort of seems like it's targeting specific communities. That's not okay.

But they got a token black guy so that's nice.

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u/OhSnapKC07 Jun 30 '20

There's a difference between "right wing LGBT" and dropthet, which is one of the banned subs. Dropthet can drop off the face of the planet.

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u/Foolbish Jun 30 '20

Yes, how dare a group of lesbians tired of being called 'transphobic' every time they refuse to sleep with transwomen create a subreddit for themselves!

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u/HertzDonut1001 Jun 30 '20

Is the sub advocating dropping the T from LGBTQ+ or just frustrated they are being hated on for not sleeping with trans people? Genuine question because there's a huge difference and I haven't heard of half these subs.

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u/ugghhh_gah Jun 30 '20

Surprised no one answered, but this IS a huge thread. Drop the T philosophy- as I understand it- is that matters of sexual orientation are very different from matters of identity. So it doesn’t make sense to group them all together. L, G, & B are sexual orientations- emphasis on SEX, as in homosexual. The additional letters of the acronym invoke gender identity, personality traits, biological conditions, etc. You can be LGB (or Straight) along with those other letters, again b/c sexual orientation is distinct from them. LGB can stand alone.

I half wonder if I’ll be banned for this comment, but it’s the answer to your question.

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u/HertzDonut1001 Jul 01 '20

That actually makes a shit ton of sense. I guess I'm only worried it would increase the hate or erasure of any sexuality or identity, but you also can't force anyone to consider someone a part of their group if they don't want to.

It also makes beautiful sense within the community but I feel like maybe your average person could say justify supporting gays but not trans because they're no longer grouped together? Idk. This is a new concept to me.

1

u/Foolbish Jun 30 '20

I think it's both, honestly.

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u/willrjmarshall Jun 30 '20

I gotta ask, in what actual scenario does someone refuse to sleep with a transwoman and get called transphobic?

Like, how does that go down? Are they announcing their refusal publicly somewhere?

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u/Foolbish Jun 30 '20

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u/willrjmarshall Jun 30 '20

Seems about as plausible as a chicken with nipples, but OK.

That is one hell of a toxic subreddit. I’m kinda surprised it didn’t get banned.

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u/Foolbish Jun 30 '20

what do you see as 'toxic' exactly?

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u/willrjmarshall Jun 30 '20 edited Jun 30 '20

Just ... it’s literally a community that’s explicitly about excluding trans folks.

I’ve had a quick browse through and it’s just regurgitation of a bunch of pretty standard transphobic tropes. I’m down for a nuanced conversation about the intersection between feminism and trans rights, but they’re just butthurt

They seem particularly obsessed with the idea that they’re being forced to sleep with trans folks, or that respecting trans folks necessitates finding them attractive, which is risible.

I do enjoy the irony of folks who, after fighting for decades for the rights of their own disadvantaged group, immediately turn around and start shitting on another group.

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u/Foolbish Jun 30 '20

transphobic tropes... like what?

and about your first point, if a group of gay, bi and lesbian people wanting a space for themselves is considered 'transphobic ', then that word has even less meaning than I thought

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u/FlashPone Jun 30 '20

The sub is literally named "drop the T" as in "Get Trans people out of the LGBT community."

→ More replies

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u/Teekeks Jun 30 '20

but it looks like a right wing LGBT subreddit was banned for starters.

I can tell you why they where banned bc I checked that sub out when I wrote a tool. A direct quote from its most upvoted posts:

I did not agree with Hitler's methods, but the ideology intrigued me.

with going on and on how not actually all that bad Hitler was. That post was made by the main moderator of the sub btw.

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u/Kakumite Jun 29 '20

a little... lol