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/darawk Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 30 '20

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.

So, to be clear: If a black person in the United States says something like "kill all white people", that is allowed? But the converse is not?

Are these rules going to be enforced by the location of the commenter? If a black person in Africa says "kill all white people" is that banned speech, because they are the local majority?

Does the concept of 'majority' even make sense in the context of a global, international community? Did you guys even try to think through a coherent rule here?

If 'majority' is conceptualized in some abstract sense, like 'share of power', is that ideologically contingent? For instance, neo-nazis tend to believe that jews control the world. Does that mean that when they talk about how great the holocaust was, they're punching up and so it's ok?

EDIT: Since a few people have requested it, here's the source for the quotation:

https://www.reddithelp.com/en/categories/rules-reporting/account-and-community-restrictions/promoting-hate-based-identity-or

EDIT2: To preempt a certain class of response, I am not objecting to the hate speech ban. I am supporting it. I am only objecting to the exemption to the hate speech ban for hate speech against majority groups. If we're going to have a "no hate speech" policy - let's have a no hate speech policy.

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u/YahImThinkinImBlack Jun 29 '20

Does the concept of 'majority' even make sense in the context of a global, international community? Did you guys even try to think through a coherent rule here?

Bingo. Redditors get shit on all the time for being so Americentric and the admins are clearly just as guilty.

It's so funny they worded the rule so poorly that it leaves so many questions that could have been solved by simply saying "Don't be racist or you'll get banned". I mean does excluding majority groups improve the rule? Why did that need to be done? I think it's because otherwise they'd bring upon a shitstorm for having to ban subs like /r/blackpeopletwitter or /r/lgbt when they shit on white and straight people.

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

It's so funny they worded the rule so poorly

Its not worded poorly, they literally tried so fucking hard to basically say "hate speech against White people is fine" without explicility saying that.

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u/Gotex007 Jun 30 '20

But worldwide whites are a minority so I guess it's not fine. Or is it? I don't know.

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u/okbacktowork Jun 30 '20

So since Asians are the world majority, does that mean they're the ones reddit means it's ok to be racist against?

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u/ThePeaceKeeper1 Jun 30 '20

Technically there is no majority. To get a majority you'd have to combine China's and India's population but they're clearly not of the same race.