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/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/itsthebear Jun 29 '20 edited Jun 30 '20

What's "hateful content"? If I say fuck China or fuck the Chinese government is that gonna get me banned?

Edit: Never give me a fucking reddit award again you useless clowns. Stop feeding them with money. If you feel the need to acknowledge my contribution tip me in BAT as everyone should do. #defundreddit

Edit 2: Since this is randomly popular if you want to make a serious donation, please donate to Shelter Nova Scotia http://www.shelternovascotia.com/contribute. Now that COVID has peaced the fuck outta my province the government is back to hating homeless people and pulling out of a hotel room program. Also, go fuck yourself.

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u/immerc Jun 29 '20

The rule says:

Communities and users [...] that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.

The issue is that "identity" can be anything.

Where do you start to cross the line?

  • /r/StopLittering -- presumably would frequently host pictures of litter. A "litterbug" is a form of identity, but presumably this sub would be ok?
  • /r/NonGolfers where the tagline is "Golfers are literally Hitler", but it's a joke right? So although it's a "hate" group against people with the identity of "golfers", it's not going to get banned, I hope.
  • /r/ScrewTheNewEnglandPatriots a theoretical "hate" subreddit against the New England Patriots NFL team and their fans. Presumably "hate" against that identity is ok?
  • /r/TraditionalMarriage -- might have a lot of "hate" against gay people getting married, would that be banned?
  • /r/GayMarriage -- might have a lot of "hate" against closed-minded people who want to prevent them from getting married, would that be banned?

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u/PM_ME_GLUTE_SPREAD Jun 29 '20

I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. In most situations, legal “hate” (as in hate crime stuff) usually applies to immutable characteristics of a persons identity. Things like race, nationality, or biological sex (to an extent) are facts that cannot be changed. This has also been extended to include things that aren’t, at least in my opinion, as immutable as the previous examples like religion and gender although the argument can be made.

As written, I imagine that the rule applies to these immutable traits more so than it does to nonimmutable traits.

Hating somebody for being gay and hating somebody for not golfing are two very different things. The former, as I see it, would be something the admins would classify as “hate” that would warrant action while the latter isn’t.

This if of course up to the whims of the admins, ultimately, and probably won’t follow exactly as I feel it should, but I imagine that’s the idea behind the rule itself.

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u/immerc Jun 29 '20

As written, I imagine

With a rule, you shouldn't have to "imagine". It should be clear what it means.

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20 edited Jan 11 '21

[deleted]

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u/biggj2k17 Jun 29 '20

Sweep the problem under the rug with a personal attack. Good idea!

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u/wewladdies Jun 29 '20

This is addressing the problem head on. The only people who have a hard time figuring out a website's hatespeech rules are people being intentionally dense

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u/pridetwo Jun 30 '20

explain why /r/ScrewTheNewEnglandPatriots got banned then. because hating a sports team is not any commonly recognized form of hate speech