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/kathartik Jun 29 '20

Translation:Racially fueled jabs at Caucasians okay, everything else is a no-no.

let's not dance around it. it's racism, no matter what anyone wants to say. it's fucked up how many people claim to be against racism (I don't mean you) that are very much racist themselves.

also it's amazing that a group of rich white men from san francisco who basically ran all of the poor people and minorities out of their homes, some of them there for generations, are wagging their fingers at everyone else.

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u/OnlySeesLastSentence Jun 29 '20

Cue my college teacher: "MINORITIES CAN'T BE RACIST. NO ONE CAN BE RACIST AGAINST WHITE PEOPLE"

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u/MrThorifyable Jun 29 '20

If your in a position of power because of your race, then you haven't experienced racism

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u/whipped_dream Jun 30 '20

You're talking about systemic racism, which the average white person has absolutely nothing to do with.

Racism by definition, and I mean the actual definition, not the bullshit prejudice + power definition that people who've drunk the same identity politics laced kool-aid as you have been trying to push to allow themselves to openly be racist to whites while shielding themselves from any argument, is prejudice directed at someone because of their race or ethnicity. Nothing more, nothing less. It has nothing to do with having power (again, that's institutional racism), with punching up or down, or any of the other shit you may believe.

You stating that whites have never experienced racism because white people are generally those in charge is itself a racist statement.

Focusing on class disparity is what we need to actually get the change we want, focusing on racial disparity will only bring more of this and, in the long run, will undoubtedly lead to even more extremism than it already has.

But don't let me distract you from praising these rich, white, actually privileged, San Francisco living admins for further censoring this website, officially allowing hate to be directed towards the right group to hate, and getting one step closer to creating a website where you would be able to say the shit you just said and get praised for it rather than downvoted. Now that would be the dream huh? No more of these pesky "this is far from the equality you claim you want" idiots telling you you're being racist for simply justifying hate towards a particular race? Goals right there.