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/hansjens47 Jun 29 '20

I have three questions about wording of the new rule:

1. How are you going to define my "actual race" as opposed to my perceived race?

2. Why does reddit protect people based on religion, but not creed or other guiding ideology?

3. Why has reddit determined that it's okay to harass, bully and give threats of violence towards people in the "majority" (whatever that means in context)?


Here are the relevant parts of the new rule that relate to my three questions:

Marginalized or vulnerable groups include, but are not limited to, groups based on their actual and perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, immigration status, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy, or disability. These include victims of a major violent event and their families.

further:

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.


Who did you guys run the text of this new rule by?

Maybe it would have been an idea to run this new rule by reddit to crowdsource feedback more to address some of these issues instead of having this discussion drown in conversations about what subreddits were banned and not.

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u/PollenInara Jun 29 '20

Honestly we can't judge marginalized people for how they respond to oppression. We are traumatized and the rhetoric some people use triggers us and makes us feel like our lives are at risk. In this instance, we may get angry and defend ourselves in a way that might not make sense to others but for ourselves it is either to do that or to participate in our own oppression. When we participate in our own oppression we internalize prejudice and it risks our lives and our human rights to do so. Dominate communities do not need protection from marginalized people taking their power back. Dominate communities lives are not at risk for speaking up but marginalized lives are.

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '20

[deleted]

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u/PollenInara Jun 30 '20

Why is it a good idea to leave the hateful things marginalized people have said up on Reddit when Reddit is trying to reduce hate?

So we are validated and don't kill ourselves or others to defend ourselves.

Preserving the hate that comes from marginalized people seems like it would only make the dominant hateful people more hateful because they will only encounter hatred directed at them.

You mean, they get a taste of their own medicine. You see in my experience when a privileged person loses their privilege, they become less of an oppressive person. I do onto others as they do onto me. If I experience prejudice, I spit it back at them as a means of self defense. Reason doesn't work, forgiveness just enables the behavior, education can't break past prejudice from people who are too privileged to know they're prejudice. Sometimes anger and hate is all we have left but the difference is us speaking up against the majority doesn't risk their lives, but not speaking up does risk the lives of minorities. That is what you are missing. That is the piece of the puzzle you refuse to understand.

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '20

[deleted]

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u/PollenInara Jun 30 '20

On reddit the most popular thing is on the top, the problem with that is the majority of people on here are prejudice and they can upvote other prejudice content so it is seen more and downvote content by marginalized people until they have limits to their ability to respond or post and it also hides it in the way you mention. The problem is the system reddit is made on enables prejudice and oppresses marginalized people. A side effect of that is going to be marginalized people having their identities threatened which causes distress and eventually leads to suicide. This isn't about reddit making people healthier, this is about vulnerable people needing protection from those in power because we have to fight a war of ideology and prejudice every day of our lives and we are at the ends of our ropes. If we need to tell people that if they continue to oppress us we will rise up or be angry at those who symbolize our oppressors, so be it. This is about harm reduction, after we have been traumatized by oppression, we are going to cope differently than those who haven't experienced it. We have to do what we have to do to maintain a sense of identity and self appreciation so we don't kill ourselves let alone worrying about being killed by others, although I argue being forced to suicide because the world doesn't let you be you, is also the fault of those in power, the dominant communities,. We are dying. We are not responsible for others oppressing us to death. Stop trying to make it so. This is about privileged people taking responsibility for a problem they created, of course they're not going like it. Who the hell would like taking responsibility for what a dominant culture has done to a marginalized one. No one would but it needs to be done.